060: It Can Be Smaller

A manifesto to simplify

Hi everyone,

Hope you’re all doing well, wherever in the world you are. I’m very excited about the 100 Rejections Challenge that I announced last week. If you missed it, we’re working together to collect 100 rejections in 2023. There will be prizes! And community! Come check it out and sign up by February 12.

I’m going to say a thing, and before I say it I want to say something else: I love Marvel movies. I’m a sucker for the MCU, for the audacious project they did to tell a story across 20-something movies, and I can wax rhapsodic over the character development arc of Tony Stark/Iron man from Iron Man (2008) to Avengers: Endgame (2019). I like Marvel.

Okay. Now, The Thing:

The stakes in Marvel vehicles are BIG. It’s almost always a world ending, half of humanity disappearing, villain destroying a major European city, aliens invading, gods warring type stuff. The stakes are, arguably, too big too often.

As I said, I like that stuff. It’s fun. All I ask of movies is that I have a good time watching them, and I nearly always have a good time if something from the MCU is on. But that doesn’t mean that every story has to have stakes that high. It’s so much. Emotions run too strongly when the fate of the universe is around every corner.

I hear from so many other writers who worry that ‘fate of the universe’ type stories are all that sell now. Whether it’s movies, tv, books, or video games—if it doesn’t go big, it gets sent home. So they think they have to tailor their storytelling to it, making their stories bigger than they originally envisioned to try to fit this trend.

Image source.

I’m here to tell you: You don’t have to. The stakes in your story can be smaller than this. They have to be big enough to feel important—for instance, it would take a real comedic talent to get me through a story about someone debating whether or not to get the mail for 300 pages—but the stakes do not have to be the size of the world will end if my character doesn’t do this right. If the story you feel called to tell is about a cast of characters deciding the fate of the world, great! Lots of books are about that. Leigh Bardugo’s Shadow and Bone series does this quite well!

But if you don’t feel called to write that, that’s okay too.

I started thinking about this a lot after I broke my rib. Once I was home from the hospital, I realized that my worldview had shifted a little. I was nervous a lot, my anxiety out of control in the face of both being severely injured and taking prescribed opioids to deal with the pain. I’m not saying the last three weeks would make an interesting story (they wouldn’t), but that the shift happened over something relatively small. The stakes weren’t world-ending, it was a broken bone. But it changed me.

Your stakes can be that small because human psychology is that sensitive. Think about the last time you were anxious or scared—was it because the world was ending, or was it smaller than that?

The basic journey of any character is Normal life → Face an obstacle → Adjust → Fail → Adjust again → Figure it out → New becomes normal. The obstacle in Marvel is usually “Bad Guy Wants to Take Over” but it doesn’t have to be. It can be “Broke a bone” or “Failed a test” or “Didn’t get the job.” For the right character, each of those obstacles is big. It’s not ‘fate of the universe’ but it can feel like the end of their life. And getting past that is still a good character arc.

So lower the stakes a little and see what happens. Maybe the story is more interesting that way.

Yesterday I was featured in

On Substack

in a great post on how to promote your book. Check it out here!

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