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Say what you will about The Last Jedi, but it’s been eight years since the film has been released and we’re still discussing it. Love it or hate it, you can’t say it’s irrelevant. Even Brandon Sanderson, the author behind the Cosmere book universe, can’t help but bring up the 2017 Star Wars film during a discussion about storytelling tips.

“Watch for extraneous plot elements, or just extraneous info dumps, or extraneous stuff where you go for three chapters to a casino planet and no one understands why you’re there,” Brandon Sanderson says during a spotlight panel at New York Comic Con 2022.

While Sanderson believes the casino side quest was ill-advised, he has plenty of good things to say about Star Wars: The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson.

“We like to joke about The Last Jedi, and I have an enormous amount of respect for Rian Johnson because he was doing a lot of new and different things with Star Wars, which you know is difficult to do. I have run into almost the exact same thing in my books where people will read in the beta-reads and be like, ‘Why are we on this side quest?’ And you have to remember that a lot of the psychology will be that if they don’t understand why the side quest is happening, particularly if the characters have indicated to them that they don’t want to be there.”

“For instance, if you have Finn saying, ‘My plot arc is I need to find my friend Rey and help her,’ and then the story says, ‘No, you’re going to do this other thing,’ then it’s going to be implanted in the reader’s brain. Watch my lecture on promises, progress, and payoff, because a lot of times you haven’t set up the right promises. You’ve done something and the reader feels like the whole thing is spinning wheels to get back to a main storyline and that’s another version of slowness.”

For more from Brandon Sanderson, check out the complete panel video below:

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