Avoiding spectacle creep

I'm sure many people here are familiar enough with episodes of Doctor Who from 2005 onwards to know they faced this problem. Here's my advice: do what the series did from 1963 to 1989 instead. In other words, don't try giving each arc higher stakes than the last one at all; just write each arc in its own terms, building on old continuity only when you have an idea for how to do so that's good in some respect other than raising stakes.

posted about 6 years ago

CC BY-SA 3.0

J.G.‭

320 reputation 5 39 58 0

I think this is a TV/Comic problem. What I mean by that is you're used to ingesting stories which are made for TV, probably broadcast; or comics where each issue must progress with the same cast and have hundreds of stories. They have very short amounts of time to tell individual stories and if they engage in development, rather than returning to the same archetypal characters you often find those stories suffer given time. (note, not allowing development has it's own consequences). It's largely an issue of branding. The characters become iconic, farcical. And then it's super hard to change them. It's hard to challenge a group of people who have already been challenged. It's hard to maintain a readership or viewership when you shift. Agents of Shield is a prime example of a show suffering from this spectacle creep; perhaps it's fitting that it's both a comic book and a TV show in many respects.

If you don't want have this problem; the answer is actually quite simple. Don't make this problem for yourself. Don't play the game where you can only tell stories about a set of iconic people. Kill people off. Let them graduate from the trials and tribulations you've thrown at them and move on to new people with new ideas and new problems. Make the brand your world and not your people. Or, be very stringent about never escalating the spectacle; and if you do escalate... end the arc, write the end.

Look, it's not like the universe of books is having an escalation war. Many books in the past are still interesting. It's possible to jump from reading a book with high stakes to a book with different (if not lower, more personal) stakes. And if it's not true that stakes must escalate for the universe of books, it should be possible to build a series of loosely related works that do not engage in escalatory warfare with each other.

posted about 6 years ago

CC BY-SA 3.0

Kirk‭

280 reputation 9 31 52 0

I would say focus more on character. "He's saved the world. He's saved the universe! But can he save his deepest friendship after _____?" This could also be a backstory vehicle, but leave the backstory in the background (probably). The problem to solve is always in the now.

posted about 6 years ago

CC BY-SA 3.0

System‭

3226 reputation 147 215 553 0

Similar to what has already been said, but I'd say do what they do in long-running television series. In Law and Order, they have mostly single episodes dealing with a new criminal. Same in many detective stories or variants of Sherlock Holmes like Monk or Elementary or The Mentalist. The same in many hospital shows like House or Scrubs, another disease or new issue shows up. Same in Buffy, as Galastel points out. Same in Military Mission shows, like Seals, or other savior missions, like Leverage or the old Mission Impossible, same in political shows, like Madam Secretary, similar in Star Trek, all the mysteries of the universe and cultures is never ending. And on and on.

If there is any arc for the main character(s), it is a very slow moving one, aimed to run for seven seasons or more. For a book, the approximate life of the series. But your main characters can also remain static and not evolve, the trick then is to bring in new characters and let them have character arcs. You avoid spectacle creep by devising a dynamic that does not allow it. In part, that can be by never really defeating the bad guys. House never cured all diseases. Sherlock never solves all crime, Madam Secretary never brings permanent world peace, the military never defeats all terrorism, the cops never finish locking up predators.

You make your story the same, whatever your heroes can do, will simply never be enough to permanently end the underlying source of conflict. In a way, Spectacle Creep happens because you DO solve giant problems. Think of your series more like Star Trek or a Detective Series. Your heroes are present with a problem, the readers have fun watching them having a harrowing adventure solving the problem, and they look forward to the next such adventure with no expectation of the stakes getting any higher.

posted about 6 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Amadeus‭

3156 reputation 2 1399 613 37

While there are already many good answers, there's one option which I haven't seen mentioned (if I just missed it, sorry about that):

Your hero may discover that the solution to the problem wasn't actually as good as thought. And now he has to fix it.

For example, say the world had been held hostage by a powerful, evil wizard. Your hero finally managed to defeat the wizard by essentially disabling his magic. Great, problem solved, world saved.

Well, except that in the next book, it turns out that there are side effects of this anti-magic. And the side effects turn out to be quite damaging in themselves. So now the hero has to actually re-enable magic, but in a way that the evil wizard does not regain his power.

posted about 6 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

celtschk‭

740 reputation 16 53 99 13

Alice: Do you remember how the villain from a month ago always said how he wanted to kill us?

Bob: Hm-mm?

Alice: Well, this new villain wants to kill us ... and murder our dog, too!

A solution could be:

Avoid falling into the trap completely

Don't set up a crescendo. Decide what's the story arc you wanna tell and stick with it. Make the story compelling, build interesting characters, and when the story eventually ends and the big bad is defeated, you'll still have your characters left.

They don't have to face a bigger challenge to be interesting - the reader that followed you up to this point will already be invested in their lives, their feelings, their personal struggles. Sure thing, if you're writing an action series or an epic fantasy it will be difficult - if not outright impossible - to build a second story arch based on character introspection alone, but this doesn't keep you for carrying on this kind of narration.

Maybe there will be another challenge, but you don't need to set up an escalation. The other challenge may be just different in nature. Spoiler about Sanderson mistborn series (The Final Empire - the Well of Ascension) ahead:

In The Final Empire, the main characters effectively dethrone an evil, immortal almost god-like emperor - the stakes being pretty high. It's true that in the following book the stakes do get higher (as there are hints of a prophecy and things do get worse), but I would argue that the Well of Ascension is mainly focused on the difficulties of running the capital city after the empire is gone. Now, running and protecting a city shouldn't be more difficult than killing an immortal emperor-god, and yet it's interesting since there are a lot of themes involved, and space to explore characters already presented in the first book.

So, don't set up a worse challenge - chances are that the first challenge was pretty difficult in the first place - set up a different one. Better still, carry your character development forward.

Your hero may as well be an immortal superhero at the end of book 1, but he/she will still have to face personal issues inherently connected to being human (and if he/she's not human, with being alive).

A lot of story arcs end with the hero getting the love interest and stomping the evil guy, but few tells us what happens when you have to keep a relationship (compare this as how few books deal with the struggle of administrating the world and preventing an evil guy from resurfacing).

Ask yourself:

• Are my characters all right with everything that happened in story arc 1?
• Do they have some unfinished business to attend to?
• Did they meet their goals? If so, are they content with their new life, or do they strive to some other goal?
• Are there still problems in need of fixing in my setting? Are there political struggles? Is there space for improvement? If the answer is no, why is that? Did I overlook something?

Also, remember that story arcs don't need to be close to each other, at least not necessarily. That's something that happens a lot in tv series, cartoons or animes, but it's just because it maximizes viewer attention without having to deal with uneventful periods or character growing up, or getting older, or changing alltogether. If you feel like it, you can put a time gap of years, even, between a story and the next - just remember that your characters will be a little different as time passes.

posted about 6 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Liquid‭

770 reputation 44 140 116 3

There are more things you can do with stakes than escalate ad nauseam.

First, you can vary the threat. For example, Buffy jokes more than once about "saving the world again". The difference comes from saving the world from different things; a new threat might require a new approach, pose a tougher challenge than the previous threat, etc.

Second, there might be personal stakes in addition to the "save the world" stakes: save the world without letting mum find out my secret identity, save the world and my lover whom the Big Bad has put in danger to distract me, save the world from my best friend who's gone crazy. (All from Buffy again, since I've already started with that example).

Third, once in a while, you can lower the stakes. How about helping a single person who's stuck in an abusive relationship? Or not letting any baddies interfere with a friend's wedding?

Fourth, your hero might get de-powered. They suffered a serious wound in the final battle of one story, so in the next story, they're still recovering, and it hinders their ability to deal with the threat of the day. Or they're going through some emotional stuff. Or last time they got fined for damage to buildings, roads, etc., so now they need to save the world without wreaking half a city in the process. Done too often, this trope becomes annoying (as do most others), but once in a while - it adds interest, not only by making the challenge more challenging, but also by showing the hero as not all-powerful. The audience's sense of danger to the hero increases, everything becomes more tense and more exciting.

posted about 6 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Galastel‭

1885 reputation 81 551 319 3