Exchange of Realities

Yesterday, I started talking about long stories, whether they’re novel series or role-playing campaigns, video game franchises or shows that have no end. When they work, they’re wonderful things. But we’ve all seen ways in which a long narrative just plain backfires. What can go wrong?

Photo by blaize

• Gaps between plotlines. This is more common with TV series, webcomics and roleplaying games than it is with books, but still quite a threat. What happens here is that the story keeps going, but it’s stalling rather than moving in a specific direction, waiting for the next thing to happen. Shounen anime is infamous for having arcs like these when the animation is too close to catching up to the manga; in games, on the other hand, this is likely to be a result of the game master not being done with the world but not yet having inspiration for the next major arc. It can be tolerated for a bit, but since the quality tends to go down and the tone often changes, these bridges tend to put people off the overall story.
• Length for length’s own sake. Like a gap between plotlines scenario, this doesn’t actually feed into or change the overall direction of a story; it feels more like a detour to stall for time. The worst thing about this pitfall is that it’s easy to see length for length’s own sake when an incident is actually supposed to contribute to the story, particularly in a medium with a slow updating format. (The Nova arc of the webcomic Keychain of Creation comes to mind: one extended confrontation, lasting from November of one year to April of the next on a 2/wk update schedule, and the character the incident was apparently supposed to introduce had next to no screentime and wasn’t really explained until near the end.) And when this and plotline gaps come together, the dreaded filler emerges….
• What was my plot again? Sometimes someone will start a story, then partway through forget which story it is they’re trying to tell. The longer it keeps going, the more likely this is to happen, particularly for people who aren’t working from an outline. While the creator might not notice, odds are that the audience will.
• Absurdly scaling power. While this one’s likeliest to show up in a role-playing game, it’s unnervingly frequent in other media as well. In some cases, it takes “There’s always someone stronger” to improbable levels: characters grow more powerful, so the threat grows to match that power, so the characters grow more powerful to match the threat, and after a while they’re destroying planets before breakfast. This gets silly. Other cases increase in scope: a character who spent one story saving a city may move on to events affecting greater numbers of people or more area. This makes sense to a point—but really, what are you going to do once you’ve saved the world?
• Lack of connectivity. One plot’s been resolved, or is close to being resolved, and a completely new one comes in, bowls everyone over and makes off with the narrative, leaving audience and characters alike wondering where that came from. Yes, taking the plot in a new direction can keep an overall story thread going, but if there isn’t enough connection between what’s come before and what’s happening now, it looks like a transparent attempt to add length.
• Character stasis. People grow and change; it’s a fact about life. Certainly, characters in a long-running series are likely to be learning to do things all the time. But sometimes, a character can save the world, serve as the impetus for one or more morals, master a secret art or a powerful magic item, and come out of it with the exact same personality with which she went into it. It’s not pretty.
• Information overload. I mentioned yesterday that one of the advantages to sticking with a story for a long time was getting to reveal more information about the world. The problem is that a lot of information can be hard to remember; when people are trying to juggle cast lists that make the Biblical begat sequences look downright concise, keep abreast of national politics, understand all the rules and exceptions that make up the magic system and how they’re likely to be utilized, internalize the history and remember whose artifact does what, later plots stop looking like a further adventure and start looking like a cumulative exam. You WILL be graded down if you forget this.

These problems might be discouraging, but they’re not unavoidable by any stretch of the imagination. Tomorrow, I’ll discuss how to keep them from ruining a narrative.