Scope, or How Little Should My Story Be?

Stories have a problem nowadays of being too big. This isn’t, inherently, a bad thing - but everyone is obsessed with being much bigger than they need to. Often, stories that are smaller in scope connect with people better and have a much heavier impact.

The biggest modern culprit of being “too big” is Doctor Who. The scope of the show has gone from making an audience care about a time-traveling alien with two hearts to throwing the pacifist into wars where the very foundation of all times and all realities are the stakes. The problem is that since it’s a successful show, and thus a successful product, the producers keep having to face the fact that those stakes need to be played up.

Upping the stakes is a common, and effective, way to keep an audience engaged from episode-to-episode. But there’s a point (all times and all realities, seriously?) where the stakes get too big, and your original stakes get lost. The purpose of the story, and the characters, get lost. Other stories have a plan to control or maintain their scope. Take the Marvel Cinematic Universe for example. Phase One was a great culmination of stakes. All the players had their own personal stories; Captain America and the Red Skull, Iron Man faced an enemy in his father’s company, and In Iron Man 2 dealt with some of the fallout from that and Thor faced his father, his maturity and his brother. Then we get to Avengers where they’re brought together to fight bits and pieces of all three of those things.

But the MCU faltered a bit at the end of Phase Two with Age of Ultron. One of the biggest problems in that movie is that it feels out of place, and the reason why is because it has a scope problem. Ultron isn’t really more dangerous or threatening in the movies. He doesn’t really bring anything more to the table. In fact, many of the standalone Phase Two movies are bigger in scope (Thor: Dark World) than Age of Ultron and even those movies suffer from that because the scope is off-kilter.

So far, Phase Three has wound those problems up. Doctor Strange and Guardians of the Galaxy vol 2 are both fairly standalone, so their scope doesn’t necessarily hurt the rest of the MCU (the exception being the comparison of the first Guardians to the second). Even Captain America: Civil War was a downscaled scope, significantly more of a personal story than an Earth-threatening apocalypse - but that works because it integrated the scope of its surroundings. For as personal and small of a story as Civil War is, it makes sense to the characters and to the setting. It doesn’t need to be a huge monstrous threat to be a good story.

The final scope that I’m going to talk about is the unclear scope. For as many scope problems as Doctor Who has, the most important part of scope is the expectation. One of my favorite shows of all time, Lost, suffers from this. Many people had huge expectations about answers, mysteries, time travel, Smoke Monsters, etc. because that’s what the show presented. But the reality is that Lost is a show about people and their relationships. Yes, strange, crazy stuff happens to them - but the story isn’t about the stuff, it’s about the people.

People expected, and wanted, the scope to be massive and life-shattering, Earth-threatening and stuff like that. And, yes, they had that - but that wasn’t the story they were trying to tell.

Scope should be looked at as small, instead of large. How small can you make it while still having a deep impact? If you need a large scope for the story you’re trying to tell, the villain you’re trying to make real, or the characters you’re trying to relate - then do it. But try not to have a big scope for the sake of having a big scope.

Superheros And What They Stand For...

Superheroes used to stand for something. That isn’t to say that heroes don’t mean anything anymore, or that they don’t stand for anything. But it’s hidden under layers of marketing, 50+ years of continuity and an attempt to sell nostalgia instead of a true attempt to stand for something. Superheroes are often glorified commercialization now.

A recent conversation with another writer got me to thinking about what I loved about comics and superheroes as a kid and whether or not the fundamental joy is still there. And if it isn’t, why do I throw $30 or more a week at my local comic store (other than it being an awesome store)?

I like reading about superheroes because I like being a part of something. A lot of the stuff that I read is discussed with like minded individuals. I interact with lots of comic fans at my work (both co-workers and people I do business with), and so the conversations are great. I also belong to several comic-themed subreddits. I remember during Blackest Night there was so much conversation Wednesday nights and Thursdays when I was a kid after the comics hit the shelf. It was amazing to feel like you were part of something. This is the same joy I got from watching Lost live.

On top of that, a lot of the characters were relatable and allowed me to feel super by putting myself in their shoes. This is great for me, but a lot of people don’t feel this one is accurate. This is definitely a personal truth for me, and I recognize it’s not a universal truth. Clearly I can’t relate exactly to a space alien who’s invincible and recharges with the sun, but I did relate to growing up in a small town and learning a lot morals the same way that Clark did.

Most importantly, superheroes used to be deeper in the same way things like A Series of Unfortunate Events and Lost are deeper. On the surface, they’re very commercial products meant to sell their brand, just like comics. But they were always deeper. Lost isn’t just about this island with great mysteries and time travel and polar bears. Those are elements that help tell a story about a dozen broken people who get a second chance and how they deal with being put on an island. Just like Superman isn’t about an invincible man flying around the world beating up bad guys with no problem - Superman is about a man who struggles with his morals constantly, who tries to be a beacon of hope in a shitty world. Yea, Lex Luthor is a genius mastermind with a power suit and they have some good fights. But Lex Luthor is also a morally corrupt selfish politician who tries to manipulate people to get his way - that’s why he’s a good villain.

And that’s what a lot of comics now have lost. With 50+ years of continuity and storytelling, comic publishers are looking for hooks to sell characters that have been wrung dry. This means getting away from the moralistic tellings of old comic books and trying whatever’s new or “flashy”. And that creates a problem. If in your first arc the big threat is to the city, then your next arc has to be bigger - the thought is that if the stakes aren’t higher than your story isn’t growing. Eventually, you get to what I call the Doctor Who fallacy where your threat is so big it’s kind of ridiculous.

The reality is that a lot of the best comic stories are personal, or have an underlying moral or point instead of just saying “every timeline is at risk if we don’t X”!

I could go on about this, but instead this is where I’m going to talk about my next book. Right now I’m calling it Firestarter and it’s the start of a Young Adult Superhero series. The first draft is about halfway done. There’s a lot of superhero ideas still out there, and this series is going to capture a lot of those ideas while pairing them with interesting, modern themes that will hopefully reach a new generation of superhero fans!

Stephen King, Character and Endings

About 8 years ago I wrote a short story called Stephen King is the Anti-Christ. I wrote it on a cruise during my first honeymoon. I had brought one of his short story collections to read with me on the plane. The story came to me as sort of a meta-poke at King in his Dark Tower series and the book Misery. It was a story about an author who tried over and over again to get published and when it eventually happens he is drowned in popularity and keeps pumping out books at an unreal rate.

The catch is that the writer has sold his soul to the devil to become insanely popular, but now his books are coming true and coming to haunt him. At the end of the story the writer takes his place at the right hand of Satan to become the anti-Christ and begins writing the events from the Book of Revelations. It was a lot longer than most of my other short stories (about 40 pages), and the name of the character in the book wasn’t named Stephen King (admittedly it was something like Steve Krall).

I want to love Stephen King. I’ve read his On Writing a dozen times. I’ve read the books in The Dark Tower series a few times (except for The Wind Through the Keyhole and The Dark Tower, which I’ve only read once each). I still work my way through his other works, I follow him on Twitter and Facebook and I can’t even begin to tell you how excited I am for his upcoming Hulu show Castle Rock.

But, if I’m being honest with myself, his writing varies so wildly that I find myself curious how he got so popular. So I’m going to dissect a lot of King elements, and I’m going to start with what he does best: unparalleled to anyone else in the industry, characters. For the most part, King can make some killer characters. They’re super deep and have these absolutely stellar conversations, ticks and backgrounds. There are a few exceptions (I’m lookin’ at you Wendy Torrence you boring old bat) but for the most part King crafts so many great and wonderful characters that you feel like you could know them.

What is King not good at? Info dumps. One of the reasons some of these characters are so well crafted is because King will often pause the main narrative to force feed you facts and histories. Often paragraphs at a time. A lot of his post-2000’s books minimize this, but it’s still present.

As a matter of fact The Shining is one of the biggest culprits of this and it takes thirteen chapters for the family to actually arrive at the hotel. That’s right, the first thirteen chapters are mostly comprised of Jack interviewing, coming home, talking to his wife briefly - and King telling you about his characters. Does this work? Yea, sure. It’s King, he can break the rules, right?

We were listening to The Shining on Audible on our way to a book signing (I hope you got out for Bookstore Day last weekend), and about 2 hours in I paused it and had a discussion with my wife. The crux of the conversation being: if King’s name wasn’t on this, would you still be reading it? The clear answer was no.

The last thing that King does that I’m going to talk about is something that I do. It’s something several agents that I’ve queried and submitted to have said I’m doing wrong, and it’s something I’m very mindful of. Head hopping. This is a term that writers (and agents, and editors and publishers) use when they refer to changing point of view in writing without some kind of break.

King is the king of head hopping. It can happen a dozen times or more per chapter and without any kind of word break (like a page break, switching chapter or anything) if poorly done it can leave the reader confused. I’ve been told this dozens of times in the last ten years. When asked what point of view, I used to always say ‘third person’, but after the first few times I changed to be more specific: ‘third person omniscient’. Omniscient points out that the piece of work doesn’t have a single narrator, but instead encompasses multiple narrators, that the narrator is all knowing somehow or (more commonly) the narration of the story is not limited to a single point of view.

And here’s the catch. Even after that change agents will still ask for my submission and be caught off guard, or turn me down based on the fact that there’s head hopping. I’ve been pretty upset by this, but I’ve also asked a few agents about this and had some really thorough discussions on this - some have been able to say that head hopping isn’t for them and it’s just a taste thing (which I respect), while others flounder with their response or just don’t answer at all.

So to wrap this long winded post up I want to share the only bit of advice that King has in On Writing that matters: not everything works for everyone, find what works for you and stick to it.