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Scale and scope

Chilari

Staff
Moderator
I have realised that part of the reason a lot of my stories don't work is because I try and make them too big, too important. I give my main characters goals that are bigger than themselves, goals which will change the world. It might well be a very personal goal - for one, it was to prevent injustice being done within the judicial system as atonement for passing the wrong sentence on an innocent man; for another it was to expose the father of her child for making her pregnant then walking out on her. In each case their goal is simple and personal, but because of the elements involved - in the first example, the main character must challenge the judicial system and the laws it is based upon, shaking the foundations of her society and ultimately inspiring a revolution; in the second, the father was a prince with a very good reputation, and her revealing that he isn't the golden boy everyone thinks he is means his brother is instead named heir to the throne, with disasterous consequences.

Now I might well come back to either of these ideas at some point, sure, but for me, now, I feel they are too ambitious for me to write. Too big. Too many variables. They start small and personal, but they are bigger than one person, they encompass huge political ramifications. The stories by necessity expand like inflating balloons. And they all end up like this. Every story I have ever begun involves in some way something on a large scale: kings and nobles, rebellions, wars, small and personal goals having impacts upon thousands of people, hundreds of thousands. And every one has failed.

Is it possible to keep things small in fantasy? I know a lot of fantasy books involve epic battles between good and evil. Frodo must destroy the Ring to stop a great evil from sweeping across Middle Earth and turning all life and beauty to darkness. Harry must face Voldemort, protect the whole wizarding community and ultimately the world from subjugation under Voldemort. Even in those books which aren't good vs evil, it's all big scale: battles to define an age, wars for thrones and crowns, kings and armies and whole lands at risk.

I want to try something small scale. No kings, no nobility even. Someone normal, trying to achieve a personal goal which won't have a big impact on the national or international stage. Not something easy or unimportant - to them, anyway. A journey of personal discovery, and learning about the world and coming across things they don't understand or have never seen before in pursuit of a goal which will not, which cannot, truly change the world.

Is this possible? Who else has done it before? Have any of you tried it, and with what success?
 

Xaysai

Inkling
Take my advice with a grain of salt because I've only written ~5,600 words in the last 17 years (thank you Scrivener word count), but I'm wondering about this piece:

I give my main characters goals that are bigger than themselves

I'm wondering: do you create a plot and then insert your characters into it? Or do you create characters and then ask: what would this character do? What would he or she want?

I was fortunate to have a very vivid a character in my head when I started writing so I could flesh out the plot from his perspective. This means I can say "what type of conflict would this character desire to resolve?" instead of saying "here is this overarching conflict and this is how my character needs to resolve it".
 

saellys

Inkling
It doesn't sound like your goals are bigger than your characters. It sounds like your characters have simple goals that snowball out of their control, and that sounds very true to how things work in real life. Both those ideas are compelling and I would love to read them.

My Camlann co-writers and I wanted to eschew the epic ourselves. Imagine our consternation when what began as two noble houses having a tiff over a years-old insult became a campaign to raise support and borrow armies from other noble houses. Then a bastard with royal blood got mixed into things, and a plague started ravaging the land. Right now our third act incorporates a war, invading fay creatures, two weddings, and a banishment (whoops, spoilers!). That all sounds pretty overwhelming when I type it up in summary form, but believe it or not, it all developed organically from that first, very minor, conflict. And as for scope, it's told entirely from the perspectives of two protagonists, which makes the whole thing still feel very small and personal.

I don't really want to read about someone who aspires to clear rats out of their cellar and accomplishes that in spite of all the obstacles by the end of the book. I want to read about people who are totally out of their depth and have to cope with the unforeseen consequences of things they've done in pursuit of a greater good. When you start with a "what if," you will probably end up following your story to unexpected places. Let your characters rise to their circumstances (or even more compellingly, fail) and don't worry about forcing the story to be small and manageable.
 

TWErvin2

Auror
Remember, the main character may not change the world on his/her own. Even if the main character is the POV character, that doesn't mean it is he or she that is the biggest mover or shaker.

In my fantasy series the main character steps up to do what is necessary, but he is not the only one on the chess board taking action. His moves are not the only ones that count or have an effect.
 

MadMadys

Troubadour
Is it possible to keep things small in fantasy?

Of course!

I've never been a fan of most fantasy because they always involve the characters having to save the entire world to do so. As if the only way to make the stakes high enough for the reader to care about is to blow up the world. I do not believe that you need to have such lofty goals to have a good, engaging story.

I would say most of what I've written has steered away from large scale plots (that doesn't mean short stories, of course) because I prefer a more intimate look at the characters. The way I see it, what characters should be afraid of is the ending of their own personal world, rather than the whole one. For an example, one of my newer story attempts is a character who is an old, drunk, and depressed woman who has a very simple task put upon her. For any normal person, no problem but with her defects it proves difficult. Also, if she were to fail, the world at large wouldn't even blink an eye. The intention I'm going for is that the reader cares about this character, and a couple others, so they want to see it work out. They want redemption or at least a happy ending for her.

If you want my advice on how to work on such a story, I'd say start by creating a character, one that is very flawed, and having them take on a 'quest' that is either mundane or of very little importance to anyone but that character. Perhaps, an older man wants to discover his family tree having never cared about it before but, with his years coming to an end, he wants to know where he comes from. It's a personal journey that can have many different motivations and degrees to it but isn't overblown by any means either.
 

Rullenzar

Troubadour
Two wizards with a bucket list. 30 things they would like to do before they die. Its very personal and intimate and doesn't have an epic scale effect unless one of the tings on their list is blow up the world :)

Something fun/sad like that may work.

Although, like someone mentioned before the two ideas you have seem like they would make a really good story. If you wanted to keep those ideas but on a smaller scale you could turn your nobility into middle-class or peasant. Much more personal and the world won't lose a hair out of place over a peasant doing such things.
 

Penpilot

Staff
Article Team
My first novel everything had earth-shattering consequences. The hero fails, the world is frakked.

My current novel, I started small and then as I planned, I wanted to make the stakes world shattering again. I talked to a friend and he asked me why does the world have to be at stake? He said I had plenty of material to explore to fill out a novel, and as it turned out, he was right. My story is urban fantasy, not epic, but I think you can have simple stories in epic settings too. For my story if the hero fails, the world will go on. Only the hero and his family/firends will be frakked.

I found that telling this simple story let me focus in on moving characters emotionally from one point to another instead of just physically. I still got to explore key parts of my world, but I also got to delve deeper into my characters because that was the focus of the journey, not the battles or the epic consequences, and I think that made me a better writer overall.
 
Is there more than one element at work in determining a story's scope? You seem to be describing stories in which the protagonists do seemingly unimportant things to resolve a major problem, and wind up affecting the problem in a massive way. I've read and written stories in which the protagonists do seemingly unimportant things to resolve a major problem, with seemingly unimportant results that may in the future turn out to be important. (For instance, two musicians on opposite sides of a war teach each other their music. This has no effect on the progress of the war--when the story ends, all they've done is change the mind of a single mercenary.)
 
Sounds like you have a good eye for character reactions, societies, and the ripple effects that things can create... and that keeps leading your stories into more escalation than you thought.

I've had problems with this myself, and I think the trouble with the scale surprising the writer is this: Doing the evolving story justice suddenly needs attention to the characters and their decisions that get caught in the new ripples. You wanted to write about one court and the paternity charges in it, and suddenly you've got a new prince and all the churches, ambassadors, and maybe wars that weigh in on that. Great if that's what you want, mounds of baggage if it's not.

So you might want make a point of starting on a smaller scale; expose the captain of a duke's guard instead of a favored prince, so the complications rise not to the fate of a kingdom but maybe to the level of an inept lieutenant leaving the duke vulnerable to assassins.
 

SeverinR

Vala
Is it possible to keep things small in fantasy?
I want to try something small scale.
Is this possible? Who else has done it before? Have any of you tried it, and with what success?

People seem to think every novel in fantasy must be Epic, in any other genre there are non-epic novels. Life can be interesting even if you aren't trying to protect or destroy the Country,world, universe.

My characters start small, and they might find a path to epic or they might just stay small.

Think about books and novels in other genres, that story switched to a fantasy setting can be a good story too.

You need conflict, characters and a good setting, none of that has to be world changing.
Epic is but one type of story.
 

BWFoster78

Myth Weaver
I don't really want to read about someone who aspires to clear rats out of their cellar and accomplishes that in spite of all the obstacles by the end of the book.

I think that this very concept can be well done and be interesting. If the poster doesn't mind, I may steal this idea.
 
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