Trope of the Month October: Scope Creep

[unrepentantAuthor]

A new month, a new trope! Welcome to Trope of the Month, in which we draw your attention to a trope in fiction.

Many thanks to @Cresselia92 for drafting much of the below.

This month's topic is a common tangle among writers: scope creep. The term "scope creep" is refers to ongoing changes or additions to a project—which could be anything, including prose fiction and indeed fanfiction—that lead to an uncontrolled growth of the project beyond the original premise. In a serially published story, like most fanfics, they means expanding the scope of the story beyond the characters and plot points the author originally had in mind.

It's easy to stumble into this trap as a artistic creative even with a clear brief, and particularly so for a fanfic author! In fact, fanfic writers become more and more likely to fall into it as their writing skills improve, their past errors become more glaring, missed opportunities pop up, and plot bunnies and ideas multiply. As a result, a writer may risk changing their outline to incorporate those new ideas, revising the published parts of the story to accomodate new plans, and steer the direction of the narrative into more audacious territory.

A notorious example of possibly-unintended scope creep is the web serial Homestuck. The story starts with a boy who receives a beta videogame in his mail, which leads to a meteor storm destroying his home, and the game being played for incalculably vast stakes. Eventually, even time travel, a parallel universe, and character deaths become trivial in the face of a rapidly inflating plot. Outside the story itself, its author reacted at one point to its success by commissioning a spinoff video game. It's hard to tell what was part of the original concept, and the scope was rather out of hand by the time Homestuck started to suffer lengthy periods of hiatus.

Scope creep can be intentional, however! A well-known franchise that uses deliberate scope creep is the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The first movie in this canon features a man building a technological suit of armour to prevent the use of the weapons he designed by terrorists, and a post-credits hint that he may join a team of superpowered heroes. The hint at a future film in which individual characters would come together for a grander story was part of the marketing for The Avengers, several years ahead of time! Twenty movies later, the scope of the MCU has spread across dozens of powerful characters, time travel and alternate timelines, and the death of half of all life in the universe. This was planned, and seems to have been a financial success, whatever the artistic merits of such a plan may or may not be.

Whether you intend to greatly expand the scale of your story's narrative over time, or are simply prone to following creative inspiration midway through a project, it's good to try and stay on top of what's achievable within a project. Here are some ideas about doing so!

1. The first important step is to have a well-defined outline of the story. I have no idea how common it is to have a detailed synopsis prepared before committing to a project, but after fifteen years of writing fanfiction, I am starting to feel I ought to do it more. Nail down characters with their goals and stakes, determine important events and potential twists and turns, and make sure to keep the premise of the story consistent and faithful to itself. The more defined your original idea is, the less likely you will later feel a need to "fill gaps" and add "improvements".

2. "Kill your darlings". No, this is not the suggestion of a serial killer. This phrase going back to the early 1900s is common writers' advice to cull any prose which is unnecessary to the story, however delightful they may be. Determine if a part of the storyline, a character or narrative passages are necessary to the story or not. Does the story progress more effectively without them? Then they ought to be scrapped. You may disagree, particularly if what you love about fanfiction is the messiness and scale of large chaptered longfics. Let us know!

3. Focus on the goal of your own fanfic or original story, without thinking about fulfilling determined or arbitrary expectations. Remember that your story is your own, so don't derail it just for the sake of meeting arbitrary standards and adding potentially unnecessary requests and additions. I once had a neat little concept for a story that suffered not much scope creep as scope orbital ascent, as my writer friends egged me on to expand the conflict as far as possible. Naturally, this killed the project dead as I became creatively burnt out. Don't be a slave to the expectations of others, that's what I say!

Have you experienced scope creep at all? Do you have any thoughts on avoiding or exploiting it? Share them in the thread below!

 

[Daren]

Scope creep can be a significant issue in writing; fantasy literature has become sort of infamous for trilogies turning into seven or eight books in the modern era.

2. "Kill your darlings". No, this is not the suggestion of a serial killer. This phrase going back to the early 1900s is common writers' advice to cull any prose which is unnecessary to the story, however delightful they may be. Determine if a part of the storyline, a character or narrative passages are necessary to the story or not. Does the story progress more effectively without them? Then they ought to be scrapped. You may disagree, particularly if what you love about fanfiction is the messiness and scale of large chaptered longfics. Let us know!

The hardest but most important rule. Just last night I found myself chopping out some paragraphs that really just slowed things down and didn't add anything except unimportant trivia.
It's the eternal struggle.

Have you experienced scope creep at all?

This is a recurring problem for me (and not just in writing--I've done game mods before and 60% of them go from "a few tweaks" to "overhaul several major systems" around day three). I ended up cutting about half of my plots for one of my fics that had ballooned out of control during the planning phase (thankfully before I started writing!).

 

[Juliko]

Huh, this is the first time I've heard of scope creep. I learned something new today!

 

[LightningTopaz]

This is something I still struggle with. As a wise artist once said, "It's easy to add stuff in, but hard to take stuff out."

It's not the end of the world if you have to take something out--you can always save it for another project.

 

[Greninjaman]

I can see how it's hard to do so. You want to see your story grow and expand.

 

[SparklingEspeon]

I've been meaning to post to this for... months now, but no point further putting it off, I suppose.

Have you experienced scope creep at all? Do you have any thoughts on avoiding or exploiting it? Share them in the thread below!

I'll say that I definitely have experienced scope creep at some level while writing, which is what I suspect happens to pretty much any writer when they start writing big. It's just easy to add ideas you think are cool into the plot, and here's one, and here's another, and over there's another, and it just snowballs until you have something that doesn't look remotely like what you set out to make. (Perhaps it may be that the writers who experience scope creep are just inclined to write big. )

I think a point about scope creep I've noticed in my personal experience that the opening post doesn't quite cover is that scope creep can sometimes come about from putting patches on your work. For instance, you might come up with a cool piece of lore to patch up a plot hole you couldn't explain your way out of with the existing building blocks, and now there's this new facet of your lore that you want to explore and integrate into the story. It's unfortunately very easy to fix things by going bigger, because by answering a question with another question (in this case, the premise of all that new lore) you're digging yourself out of the immediate hole and into a much larger one later on. The famous television series Game of Thrones actually suffers a lot from this! (spoilers for GoT) The writers of the television series were basically on their own from season five of the show onwards. Seasons five and six expanded upon the lore a lot, but also dug themselves into holes as it became more and more clear the writers were grasping at straws to find proper conclusions to the plot threads they'd been left with.

The question asked if I have ever experienced scope creep, and I said yes -- I've experienced scope creep in pretty much every project I've written, to some extent, but I'll use two notable examples here: one where I was able to harness the scope creep for the story's betterment, and one where I wasn't. I'll start with the second one.

The first pokemon story I ever truly wrote, and the one that got me into pokemon fanfiction in the first place, was a vanilla adaptation of Pokemon Red and Blue inspired by rumors of the Detective Pikachu movie before it was announced. Given that the project was inspired by a movie, I intended to write it as a movie. This is important to note because movies are very, very streamlined. When you're writing a screenplay, every page is worth a minute of screentime; every line counts. Scope creep can kill a screenplay very easily. I didn't grasp this back when I was writing -- I had issues with 'killing my darlings'. There were so many scenes I wanted to put into this screenplay, even though they had no reason to be there - chats between Red and Blue/Green before they left Pallet Town, a subplot adapting Team Rocket's attack on the S.S. Anne from the anime, Leaf the FrLg female pokemon trainer, scenes with the Silph Company, a detailed B plot about Dr. Fuji and Mewtwo, and so on. I wanted to do them all without thinking, but couldn't find a way to fit this all into two or even three hours' worth of page time. I struggled with this for almost a year.

Eventually, I had streamlined it down as much as I could. I had an outline I was finally (somewhat) happy with. Red would set off from Pallet Town, visit Viridian, then Pewter Cities, have his first encounter with Team Rocket on Mount Moon, there would be a montage of his travels throughout the region, he'd appear at Lavender Town, then Cinnabar Island, and head to Saffron for the Rocket takeover while Blue skedaddled off the Indigo League. Then he'd wreck Giovanni at the Viridian Gym, and defeat Blue soon after. Keep in mind this was only possible because I had grudgingly removed visits to both Cerulean and Vermillion city, as well as the SS Anne subplot. Obviously, there was little to no way that was ever going to fit into two hours, but it might have fit into three... IF I had scrapped the Mewtwo/Fuji subplot, which I didn't ever want to do. In hindsight, all of this could have been avoided if I'd just streamlined more stuff, or simply resigned myself to having a four-hour script. But I wasn't satisfied with that.

I decided that I didn't want to spend the rest of my writing career trying to fit a clear square into a circle-shaped hole. I changed my goal from a screenplay into ten television scripts -- this would give me all the space I needed to build the complicated plot I had laid out in front of me, including all the stuff I'd reluctantly axed in the streamlining process. (As a perfect example of how scope creep works, the switch got my mind brewing -- I soon had seven ambitious "seasons" of this project planned, adapting all the way through Gen VIII!) This is where the project crumbled in on the weight of its own frame. I had a much larger canvas now, but my drawings didn't even fill half of it. I used all my material on the first two episodes, but ran out of steam once I needed to do the third. Right now, I have so many different drafts of episodes sitting around in my files, that are all varying levels of unfinished because I had cool premises I didn't know what to do with... I still have issues every time I take a swing at this project even today, because untangling the mess that all this scope creep put me in is an arduous task I'm still dreading to this day. However, it did provide me with a lot of learning experiences, that I carried over into my next example.

Example two is the project that I'm working on now, Do Psychic-Type Pokemon Dream of Electric Sheep?. This is a piece that I expect to reach at least 800,000 words, and due to the material I'm adapting, scope creep is basically baked into its design. I knew it was inevitable, so I decided to use the scope creep to my advantage. To show how exactly that was done, I'll go into some detail about the base game first.

Pokemon Super Mystery Dungeon has an odd plot structure, where half of the game is spent in a small-town village and the focus is on a small group of students at a school. Then, out of nowhere, the player is whisked off into a larger global plot involving world destruction, eldritch dimensions and entities, and mysterious petrifications with no warning or buildup. I decided to undo this bad plot decision by expanding the camera lense to show more of what was happening beyond the village, even when the main plot wasn't concerned with that yet. By doing this, I was able both to explore a part of the story that I'd desperately wanted to, and incrementally build up to the large transition, so it felt earned when it happened. I've also been very insistent that anything I include must be important to the plot in some way or another. This way, I've gotten rid of a lot of extra lore, characters, and plot hooks that would be sitting around messily otherwise.

I won't lie and say it's been a completely smooth ride -- there's been scope creep in the portions I haven't written for sure, and the last eight chapters of my second arc was essentially what happened when I let scope creep run wild within reason. But the difference between what I did there and what I've done in the past is that this time around, there was a goal. There were constraints. There was a general outline to guide me, and I've the character arcs to anchor me. And I think that's what's important about harnessing scope creep; having an anchor.

Now I'll move on to the last part of this post: my general thoughts about avoiding and exploiting scope creep.

To harness scope creep effectively and bake it into a plot is a task with an explanation that's dependent on what you're planning to do with it. But for allowing scope creep to roam and build on your future outlines, or stuff you haven't written yet, I think the secret is having a leash attached to it. Anchor yourself with a concept: what is this story going to be about? Where do you want your characters to end up? What is their story about? This way, you aren't chaining your scope creep down, but rather funneling it into avenues that are useful for you and the story, and helping it stay focused as a result.

That's not to say it's always your friend, though, because there are definitely times you'll want to avoid scope creep entirely. One example I'll give is the writing of a oneshot (for those not familiar: a "oneshot" is lingo for a story on the internet told in one part, but being over a hundred words long [and thus not qualifying as a drabble]). You'll want to be careful with making oneshots too long, since there comes a point where your reader will just ask why this wasn't multiple parts anyway. Most fanfiction-related writing contests don't accept oneshots with wordcounts of more than 10,000. The bigger you make your framework, the harder it'll be to fit that all into the small capacity of a oneshot, and if you have a word limit you may find yourself cutting perfectly good bits out of a story just to make that limit. As someone who's been there, that's not very fun

Aaand I think I've petered myself out in regards to this topic. I'm sure I'll have a bunch of stuff to say to make this post twice as long in six hours, but I think I'm good with posting it now. Sorry if it comes off as a lot of ranting about "Me, Myself, and I", and I hope at least one person finds something of value in all this rambling. Thanks for reading, unless you scrolled all the way to the bottom because it was too long, in which case HOW DARE YOU

/j

 

[Coolsteph]

I can't say I've experienced Scope Creep in my own works before, either because I deliberately keep things short, don't write much fanfiction relative to my analyses, or because my fictions don't get developed beyond a well-padded outline or the first two chapters.

Thoroughly plotting things out beforehand i a good idea, though: I've found myself in a writer's block specifically due to poor planning in an original multi-chaptered fiction I made many years ago.

It's nice to see all these long, informative responses.

 

[OrionTheAbsol]

The fact that I had an old RP adapted to a story sitting in my head for over ten years should be self-explanatory. It was a RP with a basic Crapsack World, PMD-esque plot that was sort of dark and edgy for the sake of being dark and edgy. And because my other participants had other ideas on how to develop the setting (and inevitable tonal clashes), the RP got too big for its own good and everyone got intimidated by the scope of the project. Eventually, I only had three people left and life caught up to them. The RP died a slow death.

But I'd hate for the RP's premise to go to waste. It may be too ambitious to truly complete as a story, but I'll try anyway. While this story will definitely be my own, I'll definitely pay homage to those who had worked on the project. Since it's been such a long time, I won't remember EVERYONE'S characters. I'll use the scope to my advantage to see if I can write something that stands out.

 

[Greninjaman]

The fact that I had an old RP adapted to a story sitting in my head for over ten years should be self-explanatory. It was a RP with a basic Crapsack World, PMD-esque plot that was sort of dark and edgy for the sake of being dark and edgy. And because my other participants had other ideas on how to develop the setting (and inevitable tonal clashes), the RP got too big for its own good and everyone got intimidated by the scope of the project. Eventually, I only had three people left and life caught up to them. The RP died a slow death.

But I'd hate for the RP's premise to go to waste. It may be too ambitious to truly complete as a story, but I'll try anyway. While this story will definitely be my own, I'll definitely pay homage to those who had worked on the project. Since it's been such a long time, I won't remember EVERYONE'S characters. I'll use the scope to my advantage to see if I can write something that stands out.

My advice: Take it slow. Take it one step at a time. Work out the general story before anything else.
That is something I have learned here.