Welcome once again, writers! It’s Being a Better Writer, here again to discuss all things writing related! We’ve got an interesting topic to dive into, but as usual, there’s some news to discuss.

First up, I debated not having a BaBW post today because I am moving! Yes, you read that right. After eight years of living in the same place, I’m at last shifting to somewhere else.

And it is kind of a shift. It’s literally a block away. But nicer, and bigger, while being cheaper. A win all around, even if it does mean I have to move. Which also comes with additional stress because a few weeks ago I buggered my bad knee, and it’s still having issues. Which means at a time when I could just walk most of my belongings over … my knee is suspect toward that end. And it means I’m going to be useless for moving the heavy stuff unless this thing gets its act together (and after the move, if it still hasn’t gotten better, then I’ll probably see a doctor, not that I can really afford that because this is America).

This is also advance warning that my internet presence may be a little wonky in the coming days. Apparently Google Fiber has never bothered to update their account system. So despite the fact that I’m moving a block, I can’t just “transfer” my existing Fiber account. I have to make a whole new account, set up all my payment and everything with that account, then after 60 days have passed, merge that with my existing account, leaving Google holding a dead account that won’t ever be used again.

Definitely one of those legacy setups that needs to be fixed pronto Google. Most everyone where I live uses Google Fiber. Not being able to just transfer it to a new address is a pain in the butt. So I’ll be lacking desktop access for at least a few days, I assume, outside of “cheat” methods like using my mobile data to make a hotspot. Either way, there may be a small lull in my capabilities next week as things shake out.

Now then, what about Axtara – Magic and Mischief? Most of you aren’t here for news about the big shift in my living situations, and I acknowledge that. You’re here for news about Axtara’s newest book. And the news is … Beta is almost over. There’s one reader making their way through the last chapters, and then it’ll be on to the Copy Edit. I’ll start dropping previews here on the site once that point has been hit. In addition, there should be some cover news soon.

I am sorry that this book has been so heavily delayed in its release, guys. I had effectively no control over it, but I’m still sorry. Life just … got really bad for a while, and I’m still dealing with the shockwaves (for that matter, some days it still feels like I’m dealing with the blast zone). One of those shockwaves just happened to be gutting my release schedule with an aggression out of DOOM.

Okay, let’s speak of happier things, then get down to today’s post. And in happy news, all of A Trial For a Dragon has now released! So if you are hungry for Axtara content, then I hope you’ve read this tale of Axtara’s older brother, Ryax, and his quest to become a wizard! It’s cute! You can read the whole thing in four parts by following this link here.

All right, with all that news said and done … let’s talk writing. Hit that jump!

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So I’m certain more that a few of you are a little perplexed at that title. Some are probably envisioning a bunch of gun enthusiasts hanging out at the range, and one showing off to the others an amazing rifle scope, because that would fit the title.

And there is a bit of crossover there was well. Not in the specific image, but in fact we call a rifle scope a “scope” because of what it does. Which is to take a certain portion of a distant view and shut everything else out, tightening a zoomed-in focus on one particular spot.

When we speak of “scope” in stories, it refers to a similar concept. Scope in stories is the extent or the range of the story’s view. Or, in other words, scope is the lens by which our audience views the world, specifically how much of it they see.

Let’s build off of that analogy, and turn to film. Some may wonder why I use film frequently in these BaBW posts, but the answer is because it allows for easy visualization of what can often be difficult concepts that could otherwise take paragraphs of example text to demonstrate.

In film, there are a wide variety of lens combined with a wide array of ways to frame shots. Now, if you’ve ever seen The Lord of the Rings film trilogy (and if not … why?), I want you to think about some of your favorite scenes from those movies.

Now pause those scenes, and ask where the camera is. How much of a certain event are you seeing.

If it’s The Lord of the Rings, odds are many of those scenes are going to be these broad, wide shots. Not all of them—there’s fantastic camerawork all over those movies. But many of the scenes are these broad, sweeping shots, whether that’s of armies thundering about or cities rising high over the countryside.

These wide, broad shots have a wide scope. They’re showing much of what’s going on so that the audience can see the vastness of the story. A single frame from the Battle of Helm’s Deep, for example, will be a sweeping vista of the wall and the thousands of defenders and attackers on either side.

But there’s also the other kind of scope in the story. Think of the scene where the hobbits arrive in Bree and go to the Prancing Pony. Here, rather than wide shots, we’re given lots of low close-ups, to show the hobbits’ view of things. It’s not a broad scope, it’s a tight one. Narrow and focused to reflect how the current protagonists the story is following only have a small view themselves. The story uses this to make the scene feel uncomfortable and even hostile at points, confined and compressed.

That’s use of scope. Really good use, I might add, and perfectly illustrative about of our topic today.

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See, we may not have a physical camera lens, but our words are the lens by which a reader, our audience, sees the world of our story. Therefore, by framing our words and scenes properly, we setup and establish scope. We choose what the scope of our story will be.

Now, make no mistake, scope can change from scene to scene, or perspective to perspective. But overall, we’re going to choose a scope for our book, and while the story might bounce around a bit, that scope will always be the “neutral state” for what our readers expect. Readers who want an Epic, for example, will want a wide scope that shows the world at large, sells the “epicness” of what’s going on shows how even the smallest things change the broader course.

Meanwhile, a story with a smaller, more contained scope, like say a first-person Noir Mystery, will be very much constrained in its view. The lens will be what the character sees, which will often be—in the genre of Noir, at least—tightly framed settings, cluttered or claustrophobic in nature. You don’t see the larger world save in small glimpses, like when the character walks by a TV or comments on a news story. The scope isn’t about the far off impact of a company buying out all its competitors. It’s about the narrow view of who killed someone in an alley.

Both are stories, but both are viewed very differently as a consequence of the scope they use. Now, could one change things up? Yes, there are stories that in a way “riff” on the genre and take a setup or genre common for one type of scope and slap it on another. The Black Company, for example, is very clearly the usual Epic Fantasy setup … but then it confines its story with extremely narrow scope interested only in the protagonist and a few of their “friends” that never see the bigger picture. So while all the “big picture” stuff is happening, its in the corner of the frame, and you have a viewpoint that’s nearly as tight as a Noir film in the meantime.

In other words, don’t think of scope as a fixed thing, but a tool in your toolbox. A very important one, mind, because the scope you choose to use for the majority of your story will shape everything about it. It’s unavoidable, since the scope is how your audience will perceive your world.

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But with those examples given, let’s move onto the actual topic of today’s post, which is showing that scope. Because it’s one thing for a movie to do it: They have a camera. In a book, your words are the camera. So how do you show scope in a story.

Now, I will note that I’m using the term “show” on purpose. Because you can tell scope too. It’s just … awkward. I’ve read books that have done it, and usually it comes off a bit like reading a history textbook.

Remember, show is a lot of times rooted in what your viewpoint experiences. In other words, if your viewpoint character won’t experience a wide scope, then you won’t have a wide scope. I actually have seen this issue a lot with younger writers who want to tell a big Epic story with broad scope … and then have no idea how to do that, upset when their readers react to the story suddenly leaving the character in the trenches to go omnipresent for a while to talk about a big battle.

More than once I’ve seen this exact issue from a young writer, actually.

The problem is that they haven’t figured out how to let the character see those moments of Epic scope, and so they end up trying a number of other solutions, a lot of which don’t work because they either jump perspectives to something like omnipresent telling, shove in a bunch of dialogue to “explain” how the big scope went … Yeah, all very tell.

But what about show? How do we show our scope, big or small?

Well, this is where we want to think back to those books, films, (or games) we’ve seen that manage to show scope in the way we want. Above I mentioned that show is rooted in what your viewpoint experiences. So if we want to show a wide or narrow scope, we need to make sure that our character will experience a wide or narrow scope.

For example, if your character is going to sneak into a restricted facility during a big battle, but you aren’t writing an Epic and want a narrow scope, then you’ll want their sneaking to focus primarily on the act of sneaking. There might be mentions of a big battle, but only in how it serves as a distraction for the protagonist/viewpoint character. For example, it might end up like this.

Fiver crawled along the length of pipe, conscious of every vibration that rolled up and down it with his movements. The fighting would hopefully cover up any errant noises his metallic frame made as it scraped over the metal, but he didn’t wish to take any more risk than was necessary.

Ahead was a checkpoint someone had hastily erected in the tunnel, a cluster of a few soldiers barricaded behind haphazardly thrown sandbags. He counted four rifles between them, any one of them capable of piercing his shell. But only if they saw him at all. Slowly he reached out and tugged himself forward, rusty bits of old piping flaking off beneath his palms as inch by inch he passed by above them. Not one thought to look up. Most seemed preoccupied by whatever play-by-play they were hearing from their headsets.

Slow and steady, Fiver reminded himself as he continued forward. Right through the shadows. Ahead another bulb hung from the piping he was crawling over, and he slowed even further, not wanting any hint of his passage to shake the bulb and potentially alert the guards behind him.

Okay, so that was a pretty narrow perspective, wasn’t it? Sure, there’s apparently a big battle going on, but that’s not the focus. The focus is the character’s limited view and position, along with what’s directly in his path.

Now, what if we wanted to do that same kind of scenario, but for a wide scope? What would we change? Well, let’s take a look at how that same setup and prompt ends up different.

From his vantage point, Fiver could see that the battle was going poorly for the defenders. Another boom rolled over him as a distant missle screamed into a bunker, detonating against the structure and sending small fragments raining across the nearby battlefield. The defensive line was holding, but it would only be a matter of time before it collapsed.

Which means I need to get moving. If the line went, so did his chance of getting inside. Kerrik’s legions would sweep into the facility, and any hope he had of getting to the database before them would be lost.

He pressed on through the brush, trusting his shiftcloak to conceal his slight frame even as it rippled with the concussive force from nearby explosions. Kerrik’s legions had brought a tank—Where had they gotten that old relic?—and it was keeping a lot of the defensive network’s attention fixed.

His watch beeped in warning with only seconds to spare, and he froze as a squadron of drones came racing down the mountainside, passing right by him and releasing their payloads into the attacker’s flanks. Fiver dug his fingers into the loose earth as the mountainside shook beneath him, buffeted by the ringing, concussive blasts.

Keep moving. The drones shrieked on, several of them cut down by return fire even as the offensive reeled from the sudden strike. Pebbles began to rain down around him, bouncing off his frame with clicks and clacks. Ahead of him a small selection of scrub brush shook in a breeze he could barely feel above the constant buffeting of the battlefield. A glance down at the attack showed considerable damage had been done by the drones, but not enough. It had bought him maybe another minute.

He crawled faster.

Okay, now aside from the usual caveat of me providing these on the spot, the difference there in what’s presented and viewed by the character should make the difference in scope clear. Granted, if I were going to make either of these a full story I’d dig a bit more into some of the details, be that the dirty, clammy rusted old pipe in the close-in one, or the battle of the troops Fiver watches in the wider scope.

The scope is shown in each case by the framing of the scene, but also by what the character notices. I could rewrite the second example and cut out all of the observations and impacts the battle has on the character. Just have him keep his focus on what’s right ahead of him, like the first example. Now, doing the inverse to the first example is a little harder, but by giving the character the right tools to focus on, that could work too.

What this should tell you is that what our character is like can also impact our scope. A character focused entirely on themselves, with no interest in caring about the wider world, isn’t going to pay much attention to the wider world unless really forced, while a character who often wants to see the bigger picture isn’t going to do great to keep your story’s scope tight.

Showing scope isn’t just about picking a genre, and it’s not just about the lens you pick to show a scene. It’s about the character too.

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Okay, so then what does this mean for you with your story? Well, what scope do you want the story to have? Are you writing a big Epic? A close-up? Or something in the middle?

Pick a character who will enhance those perspectives, that will work well to show the scope through their experiences. Tailor you scenes to sell that scope. Note that scope can change from scene to scene—see how both our examples in the intro were from the same film series—so you can vary things. No story needs the same level of scope all the time.

But the default, what you come back to? That’s going to be something your audience is affected by. And in turn, that default will relate to your characters and what they can show.

So keep that in mind when you’re planning your next story. Think of the scope of things that you’d like to see, and then think about how you can frame the elements of your story to best sell that scope.

Good luck. Now get writing!

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