I thought this was a very useful way to think about subject matter vs storyform, and how it works across a tv series or multiple books.
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In other writings I describe how the term “narrative space” refers to the breadth and depth of the subject matter from which you will develop a story. Like a cloud, the subject matter is just the raw material – a nebulous realm in which many story structures might be found. Think of a story structure as a construct of tinker-toys about the size of a basketball. And think of a narrative space as your bathtub. With a tub full of subject matter, you can drop your tinker ball anywhere in it and encircle a different batch of water. Without changing the structure at all, you can move it just an inch and still change the nature of the particular subject matter you’ll use in making your point.
Now look at it another way. You have this tub full of subject matter than intrigues you. You’d “love to cram it all into the same story. But, your ball just isn’t that big. In other words, you’d need a book the size of an encyclopedia to cover it all, or perhaps a movie 8 days long. Could it be done, of course! But should it? Not if you expect anybody to read it or go see it.
So, you assess your tub. You’d really like the rubber duck in your story so you put the ball around that. But, you’d also like that particular lump of suds – it just intrigues you. You gently push that little bubbly heap into your ball as well. In fact, you go all over your basin and pull all the water and floating things you’d specifically like into your ball. Eventually, you can’t get anything new into the ball without pushing something else out. That is the story equivalent of the speed of light constant. I call it the size of mind constant, because it describes the maximum size a story can be and still be held at one time in the mind of your reader or audience.
Of course you can always plop another ball into the same tub to gather in a different collection of subject matter. Thus, by writing a “series of books, penning a television series, or hammering out a bunch of movie sequels, you might be able to get almost all the subject matter that interests you covered in one story or another – just not all in the same story!
(Naturally, you could create an over-arcing story structure in which each of the smaller stories becomes just an element in a bigger structure, but then the reader or audience won’t be able to see the subject matter detail in the smaller stories at the same time that they appreciate the subject matter in the over-arcing story – just too many degrees of separation or magnitude from the biggest to the smallest to capture in a single glimpse.)
Some of your tinker balls might actually overlap in the tub, like galaxies colliding, in which they each share some elements of story structure. Others may carve out sections that are completely separated. And, some may nudge up against each other just close enough to have a topical point of connection. In the end, though, you need to decide for any given story what subject matter you will include and what “you will exclude. Or, put inversely, you need to determine where in the tub to drop your ball.
From BEYOND DRAMATICA