THE CAREER NOVELIST
the novel opens, gravity experiments are being carried out on
Charon, a moon of Pluto. Mere hours before the facility is due to
shut down, a gravity wave is at last successfully sent toward Earth.
The researchers watch on a view screen as the wave breaks back
home... and Earth winks out of existence.
A tiny gravity wave should not have done that. Where did Earth
go? And why? Can they get it back? The answers to those questions
make for an exciting novel, and one in which the stakes are not
merely life and death but are the very fate of Earth itself.
Even if you prefer your stakes pitched on a more credible scale,
consider how your story can become about something more, some-
thing larger. One can start by asking what principles are involved.
Are codes of conduct called into question? Are there concerns that
go to the bedrock of the institution on which one's story is built? If
not, can there be?
If scale measures the weight or importance of a story, then its
breadth is measured by scope. Scope is a story's range of view. It can
be narrow or wide-angle. If a novel moves freely across society, tak-
ing the reader high and low, or spans years, decades, or centuries,
then it is said to have scope.
Some novels demand a narrow scope. A category romance, for
instance, is most effective when it is narrowly focused on the hero
and heroine. Their interaction is the cake, and everything else is
frosting. Most romance readers do not want too many layers (unless
we are talking about a wedding cake at the end).
Novels that demand wide scope are those such as historical
sagas, epic fantasies, space opera, and satires. Satires? Yes. Consider
Catch 22 or The Bonfire of the Vanities-, both of these classic novels show
us a range of people, humble to high. Human folly knows no
bounds, and using that range is one important requirement of a
satire. (Without scope satire becomes parody, lampoon, or bur-
lesque, and those are difficult forms to sustain over the length of a
novel. Try it sometime.)
More often, though, when we think of novels with scope we think
of Dr. Zhivago, War and Peace, Gone with the Wind, One Hundred Years of
Solitude, Hawaii, From Here to Eternitu, David Copperfield, Les Miserables,
Don Quixote, Dune, The Lord of the Rings, and so on. These novels range