Determining Story Length with the Bag of Stakes
Also: RIP Kabosu (Doge), The Aesthetics of a Protocol, & Prediction Market Popularity
I regularly get new story ideas and often wonder whether it’s merely fit for a short story, a novella, a novel, or maybe even a story that has legs over multiple books? It made me wonder how to approach this. Here’s what I came up with (acknowledging that this is just generalising and ultimately just one form of storytelling).
The length of a story is a forcing function. You can only bundle so much into a certain time-frame and scope. Thus, the primary differences in these mediums come from how many stakes you can fit into its theme*setting (the story bag) and have it all still fit comfortably.
Let me explain:
Scenes:
The fundamental story block is the scene, which I define as:
Goal → Drama → Next Goal (or Resolution).
A character has to make a sandwich (goal). They discover that they had forgotten where they put the peanut butter (drama). They look for it and find it where they hid it last night when they were drunk. They make the sandwich (next goal). They artfully assemble the most amazing toastie (drama). They eat it (resolution).
Story:
A story is multiple scenes, cobbled together.
Goal → Scenes → Next Goal (Resolution).
This can be packaged in a fractal manner at different scales. From a short story to a trilogy (or even 10-12 book series). There’s always something pulling the story forward that’s unresolved (a big bad, the world might end, characters need to prove something to themselves, someone likes someone else a lot, etc). It could either be linear (from one thing to the next (A→B→C)), parallel (multiple goals at once (A+B), or fractal (In order to defeat the wizard (Goal A), we need to find the magic stone (Goal A.a).
Stake:
A stake asks the question: Why is the pursuit of a goal necessary?
Why does a character want to become the best jazz musician in the world? Why do space wizards want to protect their way of life from an overbearing bureaucratic galactic empire?
Stakes don’t always have to include characters (which usually wrestle with external or internal stakes). Sometimes the stakes are driven forward between the reader and the story. Take the example of White Lotus, where the “end” is shown first: a murder had happened and the viewer doesn’t know who was murdered. Thus, the entire season is driven by a particular stake of: “Who would develop the animosity to murder someone on this holiday?”
A story can have multiple stakes. Multiple characters with different stakes. Group stakes. Philosophical stakes. Meta stakes. And so on.
Theme * Setting Bag:
Stakes are generally bagged together into a theme multiplied by its setting.
A theme asks: What’s the overarching point of the story? What is it trying to say and make people feel?
As Ursula Le Guin once wrote:
I would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.
A theme often adds a philosophical angle to the story. As I’ve argued in a previous essay:
The theme of a story is the core question it poses to the reader. The primary drive of the story comes from approaching the theme from different angles to an eventual resolution.
In Jurassic Park, it asks whether humanity should play God.
In Little Miss Sunshine, it asks whether winning is more important than enjoying life.
In a typical love story, we might ask whether love is worth the cost of a career.
Great themes are universal and speaks to the human condition. They deal with love, death, coming-of-age, loyalty, justice, power, sex, the individual, the collective, freedom, redemption, destiny, fate, family, friendship, and all the thousands of questions in between.
Not all successful stories have clear themes and questions, but they know what they are about. There is a point to it. Another way to frame a theme is to ask the why. Why is this story being told at all?
A setting is the venue where the theme can play itself out in.
A setting is the venue of the story. It’s the world. It’s the plot. It’s where the theme is played out in. The rules of the setting informs how the theme is treated. A setting can be literal: a small seaside town for a love story, or a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away for a space opera. But, the setting can also be more intangible as a set of rules and structures that define *how* the theme aims to answer its core question. It’s the handwaving for the sake of the story. In Altered Carbon, taking place in a futuristic cyberpunk setting, it’s not explained how its possible to store your consciousness in a chip in your spine. It just is.
A good story tends to ensure that the stakes are related to a common theme. There could be multiple themes, but it’s generally harder to get right as the story feels unorganised.
Thus, my assumption is that the length of the story is generally determined by how many stakes you can fit into a particular theme*setting.
Short stories might be able to fit 1 - 3 stakes into its length. Novels might fit 5-10 stakes into. And a trilogy over 30+ stakes. These numbers are a bit arbitrary, but generally as story length rises, there’s a graduations of stakes and agency. This can only be done well if the theme*setting allows for it.
There’s a common writing technique called the “four corners of opposition” which pits various characters on a quadrant based on they interact with a theme. This article is one the best explanations of it.
If you’ve worked hard to make sure all the characters relate to the story and each other, you should be able to find the theme easily. The key is each character’s false truth. In the house example, each character has a false belief about what a home really is. To stay true to the character’s story arcs, the theme should address these false truths and center on the idea of home.
This could be done by writing a novel that proves one of the characters correct or terribly wrong. It could also examine that the world isn’t perfect and everyone’s a little right. Or maybe, the theme could propose that all the characters are wrong.
In this example, this has at minimum 8 stakes (every character’s internal (why they love/hate the house) and external stakes (and why they want to sell/keep the house)).
The theme of “what is home?” is excellent and it can pack in a lot of stakes inside of it if it’s married to the right setting. Thus, it has space to be as long as a novel. It could be even more than a novel. What if there’s an eventual resolution (the house is sold)? Then, the sequel deals with the question of “what is home?” again due to change impacting one’s perception of home. The scope can, for example, rise substantially if the setting for it deals with a multiple-book problem of an entire home-world dealing with potential destruction.
The size of your bag (theme*setting) defines whether you can fit the stakes of a short story, novella, novel, or series in it. Too big a bag and it feels like small stakes can lose their nuance and detail. It’s trying to find a needle in the haystack. It’s using a shipping container to carry one laptop. Too small a bag and large stakes won’t fit or it will overflow.
Here’s an example of a small bag. Take the theme of “What is home?” with the setting of two friends who have grown close together going on a holiday. It can comfortably fit in the following short story.
Example: The two friends get drunk and try to find their airbnb after a late night out. Getting lost, they talk, and eventually discover that they’ve also find home in each other. They fall asleep on the beach and wake up to a beautiful sunrise. It’s 2 characters with maybe 2 - 4 stakes between. Both want to get home and both want to reconcile why the friendship matters so much to them.
Can it fit a novel? Yes, probably. If it adds more stakes. What if they meet other people who represent opposing sides to the idea of home? All with their own stakes.
Is this bag big enough to fit in multiple novels? Maybe. But, then one asks the question: does the bag become bigger or does it just become new bags? Maybe the next holiday deals with a different theme? One friend's parent passed away and it deals with death.
What's an example of a bag that's too big?
Found Family is a theme that's quite big from the start. It’s a theme that often requires multiple characters with their own stakes and in most settings would struggle with getting its due with a short story. Example: found family as a short story with only one character might be a struggle to do well. “I met these great people and now I fit in with them”. It *can* work, but the raison d’etre of found family is explicitly in diversity and disparateness from multiple people that find common ground. So, it’s not the best fit.
What's an example of a too small bag?
One classic example here and one that some fans sometimes complain about it in some media, is when stories unnecessarily have world ending stakes in them. The stakes are too big for the bag.
For example, in the theme “what is home?” with the setting of whether to keep or sell the house, can it fit world-ending stakes in it? If they can't a make a decision then the planet will be destroyed. Might be a compelling idea if done right might but it would be hard to treat the nuance of the stakes inside the bag well. If a character says they want to keep the house because it has a marking from their childhood on it, that's meaningful as a reason of sentimentality. But if the world might end anyway, why bother? It feels like carrying one glass on a truck bed without added protection. The fragility of the glass will shatter against the size of the bag.
In addition if the setting for a theme is a house, then does it make sense to have an ensemble cast of 14 characters deliberate this question? That’s too many stakes for this bag. Maybe max 4-6 people, the size of a family.
So, in conclusion, if one can answer the question of what the theme is alongside the proposed setting, one can potentially measure the size of the bag and then determine whether it fits a short story, a novella, a novel, or a series in it.
It's likely the case that a story can actually have many sized bags because you can resize it if the theme and setting allows for that flexibility. Then, the goal of the writer is to determine what is necessary. Why is there a bag at all? It's to carry things. It's like answering the question of what's necessary when moving somewhere. Do I throw things out? Do I put things in storage? Do I sell some of it? Do I buy new things? A spring clean, perhaps? Marie Kondo your life?
What size bag is necessary for the trip that will be undertaken? I think more often than not, we probably don’t need to carry along with us as much as we think we need. In other words, it’s probably easier to get a short story as necessary as possible vs a novel. If the story can be told with a smaller bag and fewer stakes you’re more likely to get across what you want the reader to feel.
However, big trips necessitate a much more substantial evaluation of the size of the bag and what there is to carry, and thus if you can get a novel to be as necessary as possible, it will likely be that much better as a medium. A story with a larger bag and many stakes is one that one might more likely remember. We don’t remember the journey of a laptop in a backpack to a local coffee shop, but we do remember the journey of moving continents with a family.
Bonus Content!
Hi friends! Spending some time in nature for the Memorial Day weekend here in the US. Enjoying being able to get out a bit. :)
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One of the conclusions to me is thus apt:
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Obvious’ and Ivona Tau’s artworks will be locked at mint time and will be unlocked according to the state of a sentiment gauge which estimates people’s feelings towards AI.
Jared S. Tarbell's artworks will be locked until new moon, full moon, and the next three eclipses.
Anna Ridler’s artworks’ liquidity will be tied to the tides of the River Thames and will dynamically evolve with tide movements.
Rhea Myers’ artworks will remain locked until the ETH price reaches $10,000.
Travess Smalley’s artworks will be locked until fog appears in specific locations around the globe.
Addie Wagenknecht’s artworks’ liquidity will be linked to earthquake magnitudes in different locations worldwide, also dynamically evolving with tremors at the geolocation points.
The input for these triggers come from chainlink oracles. Love it.
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As always, thank you for reading. May you enjoy a sunset. As with Kabosu, our last sunset is always on the horizon. So make sure to enjoy each one. Much sun. Much set.
Till next week,
Simon!