Re-Scope

Over the last two weeks or so we've been re-watching the Avengers movies for the inevitable release of Avengers: Infinity War. A meme going around mapped out a calendar to watch one film each week to sync up with the culmination of Phase 3 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The MCU movies do quite a few things right; they have great characters, settings, plots (most of the time) but more importantly, they do something that no other film franchise had done before; create a simultaneous and connected film universe that sprawls other films, brands, and series. If you're here, you probably already knew that. The MCU is one of the most groundbreaking and intricate concepts that hits on a previous topic I wrote about; scope.

So, how does the MCU keep pulling these things off correctly? How do they continually up the stakes without letting the scope get beyond their reach 17 movies deep? The answer lies in the diversity of scope. My last post assumed that you knew what scope was – and that was presumptuous of me.

Scope is directly related to the size of the threat or obstacle in your plot. In that original post, my highlighted flaw was with Doctor Who and cited that many episodes over the last several years threaten not only the world, not just the galaxy or the universe but time and space itself. That's a vast scope, isn't it? And that's cool – it's exciting! That's a HUGE threat, and you can write a LOT about it! Here's the problem; audiences tend to want a bigger scope. Once you've threatened all of time, space, every dimension, every alternate universe; what do you have next? What's left for the next episode/movie/book? Not a lot.

The MCU is already (as of this writing) 17 films big. It also spans 5 seasons of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., 2 seasons of Agent Carter, 2 seasons of Daredevil, and 1 season each of Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, The Punisher, and The Defenders spinoff. That's a lot of content to spread around. But, for the most part, the MCU continues to maintain its size and meaning in a lot of ways.

In my original post (here), I wrote a little about the MCU and its strengths and weaknesses in scope. Strength being that all the standalone Phase One movies were very personable and small in scope, which culminated in The Avengers which highlighted the  grand gesture that Marvel was trying to enact while not getting out of hand. The weakness being that Avengers: Age of Ultron didn't really follow that up in the proper scope. Age of Ultron felt much more personable (directly with Ultron being a villain created by Tony Stark) than grand.

So what is the diversity of scope? If scope is the size or obstacle, then diversity of scope is the pan of all the different threats in your story. Most stories have more than one story to follow; in Avengers one of the stories is to get and maintain control of the Hulk while the main story follows Loki and the Tesseract opening a portal to another world. The Hulk is quite the threat, but the size of that threat in this movie is small compared to Loki summoning an alien army.

Let's go back to the Phase One movies. These are all really personal stories about the four main Avengers. Thor follows the Asgardian as he screws up, gets banished from his home, and learns and grows while he struggles to find a way home. Yes, he's a god from another world. Yes, he has a magic hammer. Yes, a giant alien robot comes to Earth to try and kill him. That's a pretty large scope, right? Wrong! Thor only really interacts with a handful of people, his brother Loki doesn't really kill anyone, and that giant alien robot lands in a desert and barely makes it into a town that seems to have less than a thousand people. The world at large is never really threatened or in any kind of actual danger. The scope of the plot is relatively small.

The Avengers, on the other hand, provides a threat (Loki, again, but this time with new toys) capable of laying waste to the majority of downtown New York City and has a great potential for being a threat to the whole planet (enter Chitauri army). The scope is so large that six heroes are forced to come together to manage the threat. This makes the audience feel like there is a real threat. You've seen these characters and how strong, smart, and "super" they are – what force could feel like a threat to one, let alone six, of them?

A lot of you may be thinking; great! But you said the audience always wants bigger! We're 17 movies in and that's only film number 6! How did they maintain the rest? Well, as strange as it sounds, they didn't! This is the most interesting thing about the scope of the MCU. Think about this; after The Avengers was Iron Man 3 which saw Tony Stark explore part of his past. This is a more personal story. It has a bigger scope than Iron Man 2 (who's villain was from Stark's father's past) because it sees Tony struggling with the events of The Avengers. If Iron Man 3 had aliens invading again and upped the stakes from The Avengers why wouldn't Tony have called Cap and Thor back?

The MCU works because each movie is part of a series that's part of a bigger series. Iron Man 3 doesn't want to have bigger stakes than The Avengers. It wants to have bigger stakes than Iron Man 2 which allows it to cheat the audiences' expectations of "what's bigger scope?" This is a wild outcome, and something that seems to be exclusive to this "cinematic universe" format, but is great for storytelling.

Scope is one of my favorite aspects of stories, and it's something I put quite a bit of time and effort into in my work. It's easy to get lost in the story or to just put "cool scenes" in there. But it's important to me that the threat and the obstacles fit correctly into the story I'm trying to tell and the themes I put into my pages. It's fun to right small scope, personal stories that feel deeper and imposing – they're some of my favorites. In a future post, I'll talk about my all-time favorite type of scope.

Deconstructing Star Wars

The Last Jedi has been a controversial and dividing movie in a beautiful and meaningful series. It got quite a bit of love right out the gate with several media outlets calling it the best Star Wars movie of all time. Many lifelong fans are claiming to be done with the franchise with this, while others are saying it’s the definitive “best” movie. I don’t like dealing with absolutes, but I quite enjoyed the majority of Episode VIII.

Instead of reviewing Rian Johnson’s entry into the fantasy space mega opera, I’m going to use this division as a platform to talk about some other things. There are quite a few spoilers for the movie (which released just this past Friday) in here, so here’s your final warning to get out and come back later.

The Plan

Last November I made a commitment to dive into writing by publishing a book. Since then, I queried it around, went to a few writing conferences, got some feedback, shelved it for two months, came back and made some more changes, started a new project and moved my family to a new state for a new job.

I’ve learned quite a bit in the last year. I learned about biting off more than you can chew, expectations of the industry, expectations of authors, agents and publishers, etc. But it all boils down to that original goal. So, today I’m going to hit a major theme about me, about my writing style and about my goals.

I’m a planner. In more ways than writing, I plan a lot. I keep a regular Excel sheet for my family’s budget, I keep a Google calendar with various notes, projects and meetings that I work on (and a two separate Outlook calendars for work), but I also record because I see these plans as guidelines and understand that things change. In my day life, I work in the boardgame industry - and the same things happen. Most board games are printed in China, which means shipping, receiving, etc. all take time. And there are lots of hands on those products - so there is a lot of opportunity for something to go wrong no matter how well any company plans.

When it comes to my writing, I’m the same way. I typically start with a broad outline that makes sense, typically a “What if?” question. In previous blogs I spoke about my story the St. Howards Project about a group of kids in a boarding school with weird, fringe science things happening. Originally, this was a “What if Harry Potter was science fiction instead of fantasy?”. I usually mull this over and characters to it (I keep a backlog of interesting ideas for characters which I’ll get into another time).

Then I start to narrow that down, starting with the conflict. Who wants what? What stands in their way? What do the protagonist and the antagonist want? It’s crucial to me that those get answered together so that they’re linked in some way. If my protagonist wants X, then my antagonist should at least be interested in -X. Years ago, this would be superficial to me - I would give each character one want. This process now takes me a lot longer. Not only do I give each character more than one goal, but I also make those goals more defined. If I give someone three goals, I try to ask how they could be related. It helps make the characters deeper.

After that, I write down 15 - 20 different interesting events. They can be related, or even cause-and-effect of each other as long as each event is unique and interesting. If I were writing Wolverine, for example, one of my events might be that he dies while another is that he comes back to life. You can’t have one without the other, but they’re both unique and interesting.

This is where my outline really starts taking shape because I arrange those events in an order that I think makes sense, and my the structure of my novel starts to take shape. Using those points, I write down the things that should happen around them that could lead characters from one event to another. It’s important to note that things can move around a lot here because I’m seeing the story really for the first time. Characters may change, plot points might change or get moved. Around this time I also start taking extensive notes in the form of dictation. I open a Google doc on my drive home from work and just talk about my characters (and other key concepts like organizations).

Once the structure starts to look good I start outlining each scene. I write down what information needs conveyed, what characters will be on screen, what characters will be talked about, and what the scene changes about the story as a whole. I used to do all of this in an Excel sheet, with each sheet dividing up my acts. A sheet in the front collected a lot of the information together (including my expected word count). But I’ve started using Scrivener, and I use the notes, summary, characters and location sections to get more information.

After outlining each scene, I take a break. I’ll shelf the project. Sometimes for a week, but I’ve shelved some for a few months. I want to shake the honeymoon phase off, give myself some time away and then come back. When I sit back down with my outline, I start my first draft.

This is a part of my process, and it mimics a lot of my day-to-day life. Which is why I’ve started to lay down a more intricate plan for my writing career. Nothing quite so in-depth as my writing process, but instead of setting a goal to “publish a book” I’m going to break the plan down with realistic milestones.

The first step of that plan is to sign an agent by August 2018. That’s nine months. I have lots of existing projects that I’ll begin to polish up, as well as a project that I’ll be finishing the first draft of in January.