At Clarion West, our instructor–one of my favorite authors, the brilliant Maureen F. McHugh–suggested an idea to our class that seemed, when I heard it, to be self-evidently logical and obvious… except of course I’d never heard it stated explicitly before, or thought of it myself, and when she suggested it, my mind was also blown (to tiny bits, yes).
We were discussing one of my classmates’ stories (one by this guy, and outstanding writer I must say, and no relation to Maureen…). The story was very worldbuilding-heavy, and the plot was a little convoluted, and even the SF junkies in the class found it a little hard going.
(For those who don’t know the term, in SF-writing circles “worldbuilding” refers the fabulation–the imaginary construction–of a fictional world unlike ours, or the amount of verbiage spent in a story on bringing that imagined world to life. Stories that depict worlds radically different from ours, which require lots of details and description, or invented terminology, or other imaginary world stuff–are worldbuilding-heavy. Stories set in worlds relatively like ours, with maybe one thing added–a new technology, or magic, or unicorns, or a new scientific discovery–are light on the worldbuilding.)
Maureen suggested that maybe worldbuilding and plot complexity need to be held in a kind of dynamic equilibrium–along the lines of an inverse proportion (or something like an inverse proportion) between how involved your worldbuilding is, and how convoluted your plot can become.
Now, if you look at the link on “dynamic equilibrium” you’ll notice something important: hen used in the sense common in chemistry, we see this sort of equilibrium when “reactions occur at such rates that the composition of the mixture does not change with time. Reactions do in fact occur, sometimes vigorously, but to such an extent that changes in composition cannot be observed.”
Well, this isn’t a perfect analogy, but there is one thing that does not change: the complexity of the story.
To put it simply, every story can have up to a certain amount of total complexity, which we’ll just call total complexity Level X. If you make changes to the amount of complexity (or, in other words, difficulty for the reader) in one area, you need to compensate by reducing the complexity in the other area. When an author writes a story that increases the total complexity (and thus total reader difficulty) along both axes, without any compensation in either direction, what you get is a much more challenging, complex (ie. difficult) text… and as a text’s difficulty rises, the demand for the payoff increases.
You can do push the complexity in both directions, and write really difficult stories, of course. One of my favorite novel/story collections of the noughts–Accelerando by Charles Stross–does exactly this and I love it for that. If you’re able to make the work pay off, that is, to make readers feel as if it is worth it to slog through the nested difficulties, then you can dial everything up to 11.
But especially in short stories, balance of some sort is far more usual, and not only that: it’s evident in most professional-level fiction… including most of the stories of Stross. I’d argue that this kind of balance is crucial if you want to be producing saleable stories that readers will be excited to read.
Still, how you achieve that balance is up to you. For example, you might choose to write a story that emphasizes worldbuilding… which is fine, as long as you use a relatively simpler or more familiar plot-type (of the familiar sort: a heist-gone-wrong, a love story, a revenge-story):
Or you might simplify the worldbuilding so that you can explore a really complex plot, full of twists and turns that won’t be lost on a reader struggling to understand how the economics or the magic system work in your imagined alternate-world. While in a novel, you could just add on length to work in both, within the confines of a short story, you’re going to need to scale back the worldbuilding so that the plot is actually comprehensible, like so:
Other levels of balance are possible, of course… as long as you carefully balance it so that everything adds up to roughly 100:
(This is something my most recently-published short story, “The Bernoulli War,” doesn’t do… which I think is why it got less attention than I expected, despite appearing in a pretty respectable publication.)
Conversely, if you are working on a story and the plot seems a little thin, it may be that the solution is not to complexify the plot. Perhaps, you could work a little harder on the worldbuilding–or somethin else.
And that last phrase is where the following etude comes from. After all, stories have more axes of complexity than just two: there’s more to a story than just worldbuilding vs. plot complexity, right?
It makes sense to consider the more complex, and difficult, dynamic equilibrium that authors maintain between a whole set of aspects of a given story…
I seem to be using cooking and food analogies a lot these days, but anyway, I’ll go with it. There are five or six (or more) basic taste variables that go into cooking. The standard ones we learn in school for taste are sweet, sour, salty, and bitter, but there’s also spicy and “umami” (ie. savory).
For the sake of simplicity, however, I kept it to five in the examples below: the four standard ones, plus spicy.
Now, if you’re making sweet and sour sauce, you want to balance the sweet and the sour; you don’t want crazy saltiness, or overwhelming bitterness: you’re emphasizing two flavor characteristics, and the rest should be minimal:
This is Hot and Sour Soup:
Those foods are balanced… that is, they maintain a balanced dynamic equilibrium of flavor character, it’s just that the majority of the flavor character is concentrated in a couple of the variables, and the rest are scaled back.
It’s important to note that I’m not talking about an equilibrium or a balance of this kind:
One does not succeed in the kitchen by trying to make one’s food have “all the tastes” at once. Nor are the following particularly useful balances to achieve:
The above is flavorless–note the scale: everything is a 1 (out of, say, the 100 that we’ve been using above). Too little of any particular flavor character is not interesting, which is why chicken breast boiled for three hours in plain water is enjoyed by nobody.
So balance isn’t about a nice geometric shape: nice geometric shapes, on this spider chart, equal blandness. You want something spiky, something uneven and angular to some degree; something that looks unbalanced on the chart. That’s what will give your food (and your story) some character and particularity that makes it appealing. Balance isn’t a function of the shape, but of the total surface area you plot within your spiky shape. As long as everything adds up to 100, you’re balanced, you’re good.
Likewise, if you’re only working in complexity along one of the axes, like this:
I think all of this can be applied to the dynamic equilibrium writers need to achieve in short stories, too. Let’s take, for example, the following spider chart of characteristics:
(Note: this is a tentative example. Later on, I’ll provide a link to a site where you can make an alternate spider chart of your own, when you carry out this exercise. Let’s just use this for now. )
You’ll notice that I’ve included five specific components of genre fiction:
- complexity of worldbuilding
- depth of characterization
- pace of action
- plot complexity
- density of prose
I propose that all five of these components must be held in the same kind of dynamic equilibrium discussed above, at least for a short story to function effectively.
Your story could be heavy on the worldbuilding, but with some decent characterization and action: 
Or it could be primarily character-driven, with much of the remaining complexity taking place in the language you use t tell the story–the sort of short story that, in genre circles, people sometimes describe as “almost mainstream,” though there’s room for a little worldbuilding and of course some action–something has to happen in the story, after all. 
Again, don’t mistake the following–
— for balance. It’s not. It’s bland, characterless, and probably uninteresting. This is not what I mean by balance.
Likewise, going too far in the other direction, emphasize only one component of story, like this:
… and you’re not really writing stories anymore. If all you do is worldbuilding (that’s where the orange line is in this image, though it’s mostly hidden behind the numbers that mark the graph’s scale), then you’re not writing a story, you’re doing writing prep… or maybe writing supplements for an RPG game or something.
Okay, so: Etude time.
There are several possible etudes you could do with this chart and paradigm. (I recommend trying them all.)
- As an Analytical Tool: You could analyze a work that you think is particularly successfully, attempting to graph the particular balance that an author seems to be building. While it’s probably very difficult to be objective, it could be a useful tool… and maybe you could devise a way of being relatively objective about it. As a supplement, you could thereafter undertake to write a scene or a story using this approximate balance, especially if it is not the balance you usually tend toward.
- As an Editing Tool: Take a piece of your writing and graph how you think the balance lies. (Assuming it is balanced. If it strikes you as unbalanced, graph the imbalance.) Now, chart some alternate possible balances you think would work for the story, or even just for a scene, and try writing the scene or story again using that balance.
- As an Experimental Tool: Chart the specific balance toward which you think you tend towards. (Ask your writer friends to likewise chart your tendencies, if you like; the results may surprise you.) Now, as an exercise, chart balances that differ radically from this, and force yourself to write scenes, flash stories, or even full short stories striking those unfamiliar, less-instinctive balances. Continue daily–perhaps drafting one scene of a story as warmup to your regular writing session–until the new balance seems comfortable. Then chart another unfamiliar balance, and work that one till it becomes familiar. Think of it as playing the more difficult scales or arpeggios on your (mental) instrument.
Note: there’s nothing saying this balance needs to stay steady throughout. In fact, a hallmark of good writing is that it shifts smoothly from one mode to another, according to a rhythm dictated by the piece. From one scene (or chapter, or section) to another, the particular balance of a work may shift. It’s probably a good idea to bear in mind overall balance may not be the same as the particular balance struck in this or that specific scene of a work.
Likewise, if you really want to be rigorous about it, you might consider graphing a few balances, none of them radically different from one another, and using them to guide you in drafting successive scenes with slightly different balances.
Or maybe, at that point, you’ll have done enough of this to be better able to play it by ear.
By the way, here’s a copy of a blank graph of story characteristics (downloadable PDF), though you can create your own over at this website. (Or one of the dozens of others online. This site is just the one I used to make the example charts for this post. Either way, you’ll want to use the “Radar” chart option… or maybe a “spider chart” option, if there is one on whatever site you end up using.)
Creating your own allows you to add in story components I didn’t discuss, such as, say, metareferentiality (riffs on popular culture or other works in the genre, for example), or comedy, or abstraction. You can also plot different balances and output complete, pretty graphs to use for your own reference, or to attach to the completed exercises for your own reference, or the reference of your crit group if you end up submitting the completed etudes for discussion.
As always, I’d love to hear more about your results with this etude.
That’s all for now!