Limiting The Scope Of Your Story
For some reason, I woke up this morning thinking about how stories end. There is a disturbing tendency these days to want to follow a group of characters forever. There are several authors who come to mind that don’t seem to understand that a story needs an end point. No matter how much we may connect with and love the characters, if they are well written we will, the story we are telling about them should have an end to it. Even a long series will have a specific and, hopefully, logical stopping place.
The Harry Potter books come to mind. One for each year Harry was at Hogwarts, with a dramatic resolution of the primary conflict at the end. All the major subplots were resolved in some manner. J.K. Rowling did not try to write another book following the future lives of the characters, though she could have. She did not try to continue the story indefinitely, nor make it so convoluted that there were major plots and conflicts that were dropped, never to be heard of again. She set limits on the story. She knew how to say “The End”.
Contrast that with Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. The final book had to be finished from his notes posthumously. I think it was #12, but I’m not certain. I refused to read anymore after about #7 because, while I really liked the basic story, his writing style, and his fabulous world building, he kept developing elaborate conflicts and dropping them without any real resolution. He also seemed to have no idea how to actually end the story. It just kept getting more and more complex as it spiraled outward to encompass more and more of his world. I’m sorry if this steps on the toes of some his fans, but I have to call them like I see them. About book 5, I remember thinking, that he needed to learn how to say “The End”.
There are two significant reasons to limit the scope of your story. One is the resolution of conflicts and the other is sticking to the story. Resolving the conflicts in a story is a contract that we have with the reader. When we present a problem in a story, we are obligated to give a solution to it. They’re important even if they are bad, or unpleasant, resolutions, like a young man’s bride dies in his arms and destroys what he had worked for during the story, or the hero fails and the world explodes. Now, in the second scenario, one would hope the author would have a few refugees that escaped somehow; that’s our nature. The main thing is that the conflicts must be resolved.
The second part is tied up in world building and plotting. I think Robert Jordan’s problem was that his world building was so solid, he kept folding in this society and that little conflict to the point it became too ponderous to handle. He tried to write the story like life, exploring all the side paths that presented themselves to his pen and folding them into the main story.
You simply can’t do that. Think about any story in the news. Events are always connected to other events, other people and other ideas. If you took any news story and went deeper, you’d discover those connections and if you were capable of following any story far enough it would connect to everything and every one – eventually. History books can’t even begin to do more than scratch the surface or follow a few connected threads, so why do some authors think they can do it?
The best answer I have ever seen to exploring those other side roads is what Andre Norton, among others, did with world building. The Witch World books were stand alones. Some dealt directly with the original conflict and/or characters and some didn’t. Nearly all were in some way connected to those conflicts, in the way that major events affect everyone and send out different kinds of ripples. This way, she wrote numerous books that explored little corners of her created world. She did the same thing with her Sci/Fi universe. If I have a single long term goal in writing, it’s to develop my Sci/Fi universe in a similar way and explore peoples and worlds that have not yet come to light, but are certainly out there waiting.
How far do you go in writing subplots? That is a question I can’t answer, but if your story keeps wandering in different directions like chasing butterflies, you probably need to think about limiting it and follow those side paths later.
