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!

Hidden Information and Expectations

There are lots of tough moments in being a writer. In addition to struggling over word choice, sentence structure, etc. there are certain expectations that writers don’t necessarily know they’re supposed to follow, the most obvious one being word counts. Lots of genres have different agent and publisher expectations of word count. This information is readily available on the internet (through a few different outlets with a little wiggle room in answer). It’s not put in front of the author. Even in agent submission websites. They will say they’re looking for Science Fiction but the hidden information there is that they expect the manuscript to be between 90k and 125k. While a different website recommends a much narrower 100k to 115k words.

Another difficult thing for writers is removing work. Often writers will remove up to 50% of their original manuscript in order to get it to the goal, make things more fast paced, improve the flow of the manuscript or (literally) hundreds of other reasons. This is often referred to as “killing your darlings” because we’re a bunch of people who want to rub elbows and tell inside jokes.

This often comes after spending weeks or months writing a draft, reading it, making some minor changes, giving it to critique partners, etc. Then someone points out that “X doesn’t particularly make sense”. X happens to be something you peppered into your manuscript at the beginning, so you have to remove it or change it so it does make sense.

Sometimes, though, changing that element doesn’t work. You spend hours (or maybe days) talking with people about how to change that particular element and how you can make it work. Sometimes you need to just step back, look at the big picture, and kill your darlings. Save that element for a different project, or perhaps a sequel.

There’s a third option. Shelf the project. Make notes, so you don’t forget what you were trying to do. Put it on the shelf and wait. Wait a month. Three months. Do another project. Keep working. Pick up your problem project when you’re done. Yes, it means that the project will take longer. Shigeru Miyamoto, Director of Nintendo and designer of the Legend of Zelda games once said “A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever.” The same is true about books (and most other media, I imagine).

Here’s the important part; for readers and authors alike: this is okay. Books can be delayed. There’s a huge taboo in the world of entertainment right now about the delay of things. About how long it takes George R. R. Martin to write the next A Song of Ice and Fire books. About how far pushed back the next season of Westworld is. These are fine.

We like this content because of its quality. When we give less time to creators to spend on a project, we’re sacrificing quality for instant gratification. It took years to make Game of Thrones, and even more to make A Clash of Kings. There were two years a piece between the first three books, five years between A Storm of Swords and A Feast for Crows, and another six years before A Dance with Dragons! And it’s already been six years since then!

I have shelved a recent project. It broke my heart to do so. But the book will be better off in the long run because I did that. It was exhausting. I felt like a drug addict being walked in on while using. Like having all the puzzle pieces but not knowing the end result.

So a few weeks ago, I started something new.