A Little Change In Stories (Would Do Me Good)

One of the things that limits me as a writer is how much I enjoy stasis as an audience member.

Because many stories in the genres I read and write and watch thrive on epic-scale plots driven by set-piece actions, skilled writers in those genres have to be able to change the worlds of their stories based on the ramifications of those plot points.

If Katniss “wins” the Hunger Games with a privilege-threatening act of rebellion, Panem has to change. Harry Potter’s world expands from a cosy school story to include the past (his parents’ generation, and later, Dumbledore’s and Voldemort’s), other wizarding countries, and wizarding government. When characters outgrow or change their current settings, the next installment of the story has to reflect that with a new status quo and/or new characters.

As a reader and viewer, I’m always resistant.

I was reluctant to have to start considering the past of Snape and the Marauders in Prisoner of Azkaban. I got annoyed when Naruto’s world opened up from his three-ninja squad and their teacher on missions together to the Leaf Village kids and the Sand Village kids and Kabuto, all of whom were new characters I had to get to know. I didn’t want Chopper, Franky, or Brook to join Luffy’s crew, because I already liked it the way it was.

I like having my nice little sandbox to play in without having to worry about the rules of the game changing partway through. I’ve already decided how I feel about the characters and dynamics in this story. I don’t need any newcomers or world-shifts messing them up.

To be fair, this is also how I react in real life: I’m resistant to changes in my social groups or work dynamics until I have a chance to get used to them.

And I do, of course. In real life, I get to know new processes and people. And in stories, I slowly assimilate the new world rules and characters as the status quo. Now I do care about Shikamaru and Gaara, even though I resented their intrusion on Naruto’s world before.

But as a reader/viewer, before I get to that stage, I regard new characters and worldbuilding as intrusive. I was having fun the way things were–why’d you have to go and change them again?

Part of that, no doubt, is because I’m in love with possibility rather than the plot. I didn’t care about how Harry Potter was going to defeat Voldemort (because he obviously was) half as much as I cared about all the ways he could defeat Voldemort (or not). I like smaller, community-based stories rather than epic stories with dozens of threads ranging out all over the fictional world, because the former are easier to play with. Often, I don’t actually care how any epic story is going to end because I can already tell the general trend of the plot or I don’t really care about that so much as I care about the interpersonal lives of the characters.

So it sounds like the best match for me is the status-quo TV series–like The Simpsons or the original Star Trek*, where nothing the characters do changes the environment of the show in next week’s episode. The Enterprise encountered a neuro-parasite that killed a planet and the only way to kill it was for Spock to purpose infect himself and endure unimaginable pain? After the credits roll, none of the characters will bring it up again, and Spock will never even mention it as a bad experience, let alone show lasting effects such as PTSD.

And, yeah, to some extent, I do like stories like those. But, for better or worse, those aren’t the kind of stories I like best, reading or writing. Whether that’s the zeitgeist of the genres I write or just my interest in plotting mysteries, I had to unlearn my death-grip on the status quo.

My earlier MSs would place a character in the middle of a firmly established world, so rock-solid that nothing they did could change anything about it. Within the entrenched status quo, they could help solve a problem or achieve some status, but they sure couldn’t do anything that had ripple effects beyond them. It was all about them as individuals–their lives could only move against the static background of the universe I’d created.

This works fine for smaller-scale personal stories or genres that are about the return to status quo, like traditional murder mysteries. But you know me, I can’t make things easy for myself. Those weren’t the genres I was writing.

I was–and am–writing in genres like fantasy, where I’ve introduced at least one conceit that completely changes the way the world works. Even in urban fantasy, where magical/supernatural events take place within the familiar real world, has to grapple with the possibility of everything changing if the stakes are high.

Because in fantasy, they usually are, even in my laziest stories. Except I never fleshed out all the ramifications of those stakes. Anything that changed only changed the world insofar as it changed my characters’ lives: a kid became the king? Well, it was about how awesome it was that he could now eat as much candy as he wanted, not any of the fallout that would happen with a new ruler or responsibilities that would come with the throne (and require me to flesh out more of the world than the handful of people and situations my character had encountered before now).

I’m still learning to tear my imaginary worlds up by the roots. Because the paradox is, otherwise, I’m limiting myself to only those small-scale interpersonal kinds of plots that don’t matter to me as a reader unless there’s something exciting and epic in the background.

I don’t care about Snape outside the magical battles of the Harry Potter universe; I don’t care about Mulder and Scully as rom-com protagonists, just as rogue FBI agents chasing conspiracies and Monsters of the Week.

For the little plots to hook me, the big plots have to matter. And they can do that only if they have their own set of exciting possibilities.

*Interestingly, I’d argue that Star Trek as a franchise moved away from this kind of story toward more epic, world-changing stories.