The Joy of Low-Stakes Storytelling! Lessons from my First Novel, part 2!

One of the trends I've seen in a lot of modern fiction is the tendency toward the epic. Everybody wants to create this massive, complex, world with amazing, powerful characters engaged in a climactic struggle to save the universe from an unapologetic, existential evil that holds billions of lives in the balance.

God, I'm tired of those.

Trying for epic stories sounds like a great way to draw in readers, but personally many of the stories I love best avoid this kind of goal. I'm a massive Rex Stout and Nero Wolfe fan, for instance, and the stakes in those books are usually a murder or two, and whether or not the culprit or culprits will be caught... that's three lives "in the balance," so to speak.

Even in fantasy, one of my favorite authors is Raymond E. Feist, and my favorite books of his (and my favorite parts of his books) are those where the stakes are somewhere between a few and a few thousand lives. Think court intrigue up to castle siege, and you've got the picture.

If we think about classic epic fantasy like Lord of the Rings, that saga was the biggest thing to happen to Middle-Earth in about 3000 years, and while Tolkien didn't have a bunch of books leading up to it, we can't deny that he spent a long time building out a detailed world with a varied and interesting history, and the amount of effort he put into earning that epicness.

Part of the problem with this tendency toward the epic is that new authors aiming in this direction end up taking a bunch of shortcuts in their storytelling elsewhere, and the epicness falls flat. Their protagonists are all once-in-a-millennium hereditary heroes, their crises always threaten the whole world, and the world has some crazy worldbuilding that implies lots of big conflicts, but who's got time to quibble when the world's about to end?

It always bugs me when the heroes of some series face world-ending danger after world-ending danger. Hell, if there's going to be a giant meteor every single year, that means you need a heroic effort every single year to stop it, and it has to be successful every single year! In short, any world that faces a world-ending threat that often needs a long-standing perfect record of success to even exist in the first place! I always find that a little hard to believe, when these attempted epics become massive series existential dangers.

Another issue is that constantly holding the reader's tension at "world-danger" levels is exhausting. I know I get tired of holding onto that much investment after a little while. A good book will have a satisfying build-up, where stakes are lower, and high-stakes moments will be rare and important!

Yet another point is that the publishing world is very different today from even ten or twenty years ago! Amazon and other book-sellers love series! That means that an author is not just mildly encouraged, but downright cajoled into making everything into a series, or at least a potential series. Therefore, he can have books and books to build up his world in lower-stakes situations before attempting to tackle a huge, high-stake situation. This has the added advantage of allowing authors to build up their skills a bit before they attempt epic storylines.

A novice author trying to create an epic setting and story often means too many tropes, and quite a few holes.

In contrast, I definitively aimed for lower stakes in all of my Derelict Project stories, including Pursuit of the Heliotrope. At stake in that whole novel are something like:

• Three members of Misevelin Salvage (moderate danger)
• Seven to twelve members of Wyatt's security company (moderate-high danger)
• Nine members of the Heliotrope's crew (high danger)
• Four or five members of the Picker crew (moderate-high danger)

There is no threat to the universe, no massive conspiracy that holds the liberty of a whole planet in the balance, just nine people in a very dangerous situation, and a few more working to get them out of that danger.

I think that stories with lower stakes also help create more meaningful, yet subtle conflicts between characters. After all, "we're saving the world" is a strong enough reason to beat out most petty arguments, and if it's not, what does that say about how petty the characters are? The author can focus more on the differences and specializations of the different characters. Plus, if the world isn't at stake, it helps allow for more grounded, less powerful characters that are more relatable, which is actually a minor paradox of escapism: readers want relatable characters moreso than exactly realistic ones.

So, after all that, here's the plug: if you're tired of constant attempts at epic storytelling from authors who don't even bother to try to earn it, take a look at Pursuit of the Heliotrope on Amazon or elsewhere or any of my other works. I learned the value of low-stakes storytelling from Rex Stout, one of the GOATs, and I put it to good use in my stories.