As authors, we want our stories to be brimming with tension. To do this, we fill them with alien invasions, evil politicians, and scheming relatives who want to throw the protagonist out on their ear. But sometimes we have all those things, and beta readers still report that the story isn’t pulling them in, or if they’re more blunt, that it’s boring. When this happens, there’s a good chance we’re using too much of what we call calamity.
What Is Calamity?
That’s right, it’s time for New Terms With Mythcreants, the vocabulary sensation that’s sweeping the nation!* “Calamity” is the term I use to describe situations where something bad is happening, but the protagonists can’t do anything about it. Even if they try, there’s no conceivable way to succeed.
For example, let’s say there’s an alien attack in your story. That sounds like automatic tension, but it won’t be tense if you only treat it as calamity. For instance, if the aliens bomb every major human city before anyone can react, the outcome of that attack is never in doubt. Or let’s say your hero is a soldier fighting this war, but you’ve specifically narrated that Earth weapons have no effect on the aliens. Because there’s no chance of victory, no matter how many clips the hero goes through, that’s also calamity.
Calamity also appears in less violent situations. Your hero might get home to discover the locks changed and all their stuff piled on the sidewalk, thanks to their antagonistic landlord. If the hero can’t do anything about it, that’s calamity. On the other hand, if they are threatened with eviction but can contest it in court and potentially stay in their apartment, that wouldn’t be calamity even if the chance is slim.
Likewise, it’s not calamity if the hero has a chance to do something but fails. The court case might be thrown out, or the hero might miss their one-in-a-million shot against the alien mothership.* The point is that the outcome could have been changed.
You can also have internal calamity, something I call “angst.”* This is when the protagonist spends an extended period feeling bad about something but those feelings don’t motivate any mental or physical action. If the protagonist feels bad about a breakup and they try to cheer themself up or otherwise process their feelings, there’s uncertainty about whether they will succeed or fail. If they simply experience the bad feeling, that’s angst.
When Is Calamity a Problem?
Calamity isn’t automatically bad for stories, but it becomes a problem when authors use it instead of cultivating tension. Tension is derived from the uncertainty of whether bad things will happen or not. While making bad things more likely will usually raise tension, if that likelihood hits the 100% mark, it actually takes tension away. At that point, there’s no suspense, just inevitable doom and gloom.
Sometimes, this is really easy to spot. In The Name of the Wind, we spend several chapters getting a surprisingly detailed summary of Kvothe’s time as a street urchin after his family is murdered by a plot device. This isn’t a struggle for survival, because Kvothe isn’t really doing anything; he’s simply experiencing various privations like a lack of food and shelter. Tension is near zero for this entire section, and it’s especially noticeable because Kvothe is such a hypercompetent character in every other scene, so it’s jarring for him to spend so long doing nothing.* But even for a more grounded character, these chapters would be boring thanks to their lack of tension.
In other cases, calamity is better at disguising itself. Battle scenes in particular usually have tension until the author makes it clear that Team Good will get squished no matter what. That’s what happens in the climax of His Majesty’s Dragon, where author Naomi Novik specifically tells us that Temeraire and his crew have no chance to stop the oncoming French invasion. We’d have given them the benefit of the doubt even with long odds, but saying it out loud robs the scene of tension. Instead, we have to watch the French act out their preordained victory. Eventually, Temeraire manifests a new power that turns the tide of battle, but rather than being cool and satisfying, this twist feels inevitable.
This can also happen with angst, as in the strange middle section of The Calculating Stars. After escaping death in an asteroid impact, but before beginning the story’s political conflict, the protagonist Elma spends several chapters feeling terrible about all the death caused by the aforementioned asteroid. While it’s certainly realistic for Elma to feel awful in this situation, it doesn’t change the fact that nothing is at stake. Nothing Elma does has the potential to change her state of mind; we just have to wait until that section is over and it’s time to start the next conflict. In a book that’s otherwise great at cultivating tension, this section sticks out as weirdly boring.
Can Tension Come From Calamity?
So you’re staring down the barrel of a story full of calamity, and it’s boring your readers to tears. Should you abandon all hope and flee into the wilderness? No! At least, not over this particular problem. In general, I’m not the boss of your wilderness antics.
In most cases, calamity issues are very easy to fix once you’re aware of them. The most straightforward option is to turn the calamity into a tense conflict by adding some uncertainty. If the hero’s actions can theoretically sway the outcome, even with a slim chance, the story will be tense instead of gloomy. That solution is perfect for a story like His Majesty’s Dragon, which already has all the required setup. If Temeraire and his crew had gone into battle with a desperate plan, there would have been tension for days. Then the plan could have failed, leaving our heroes to be saved by the twist of Temeraire’s new power.
The Calculating Stars could also benefit from this option, but it would be more complicated. The main point of that section seems to be exploring Elma’s feeling of helplessness at the disaster unfolding around her, which we can’t really have if she’s doing something cool like designing anti-asteroid defenses or flying refugees to safety. Instead, Elma could have had a smaller-scale conflict about helping an injured friend or an internal arc about finding peace in the face of natural disaster. Internal arcs are subtle, but they work the same way external arcs do: with a problem the protagonist will struggle to solve before it reaches the point of no return.
In other cases, it may be better to reduce the amount of calamity or simply cut it entirely. Kvothe’s street-urchin phase is long enough that adding tense conflict would make it a significant percentage of the book, which the author probably didn’t want. At the same time, this period doesn’t have much impact on Kvothe’s character, as he’s primarily motivated by the earlier death of his family. All the story really needs is a short period of grief as Kvothe processes what happened; then it can move on to the rest of the plot.
When Is Calamity Good?
With all the issues calamity causes, you might assume that it’s always bad and should be excised from all stories forever. Fortunately, this is not the case. Instead, the key lies in understanding what calamity can do to help your story.
Even if the greater calamity is too big to do anything about, it generally creates smaller problems that can be addressed. The Calculating Stars presents a master class in this tactic with its opening chapters: Elma can’t stop the asteroid, but now that it’s hit, she and her husband have to survive the aftermath. This requires finding shelter from the initial explosion, driving on debris-strewn roads, and getting their small plane off the ground before the whole area is engulfed in fire.
You’d be surprised how many types of stories this works for. If your hero is thrown out of their home, that can start a conflict of finding somewhere to crash for the night. If the story begins with the hero’s spouse leaving them, that can start an internal arc of learning to be emotionally complete without a romantic partner. The possibilities for tension are endless!
Calamity can also be used as a consequence of resolving a conflict, either because the hero failed or because they had to sacrifice something in order to win. So long as the calamity doesn’t go on long enough to become its own section, this will feel like a natural part of the story’s pacing.
Darker stories are especially fond of this tactic, as it allows them to drive home whatever horrors tickle the author’s fancy. The Fifth Season, for instance, has a section where the protagonist tries to protect her village from the anti-mage authorities.* She faces long odds, which are great for creating tension because there’s still a slim possibility that she might win. When she fails, her village is destroyed as a consequence. Brutal, but effective.
The difference between calamity and tension isn’t that hard to learn, but it’s one of the most common lessons I give clients in content editing. Many new writers simply aren’t taught that uncertainty is what makes stories exciting, so they just throw bad things at the protagonist and hope something will stick. Once they know better, they can make their stories engaging without making them so grimdark.
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I’ve seen this in RPG’s
There’s some big problem going on in the world, but there’s literally NOTHING we PC’s can do about it
It’s frustrating, and not much fun
Yeah, that’s never much fun at all. What I usually do in such a situation depends on my role:
If I am the GM, I figure out what went wrong with my planning, because the PCs are supposed to be doing something about the problem, even if it is just mitigation and containment, until they level up enough and can fight the BBEG or otherwise end the problem. For example, if I have Vecna(a lich-god from D&D) creating a plague of undead for miles around the player’s hometown and the players aren’t doing anything about it because they’re still first level and Vecna’s in that creepy castle n the hillside a few miles away from town. In that case, what I do is I give them a bone, in the form of a couple of competent(but not too competent) NPCs to help them out, and show them how they can at least mitigate the problem until they figure out how to at least banish Vecna from Citytownvillageberg, if not kill him because they’re PCs and this is a game of D&D.
If I’m a player, I go to the GM outside of the session and ask them about this calamity and what courses of action we, the PCs, might be able to take to do something about it, and then act based on any hints they gave me. If their hints were unhelpful or not provided for some reason, then within the session, I and the rest of the players start rounding up all the friendly NPCs and holding councils of war until we get enough information that we feel confident in adopting a course of action that leads to at least mitigation and/or containment of the calamity in our area until we figure out how to get it to stop by unlocking high-level spells and abilities.
Assuming you are currently in a situation like this, I hope that these suggested courses of action help with your frustrations towards the game.
Allons-y
The Doctor
As a German, I feel the need to point out that ‘angst’ is simply the German word for ‘fear.’ Yet, I’m pretty aware that ‘angst,’ ‘angsty,’ etc. have taken on a meaning of their own in English.
This is a very useful article, too. There sometimes is a very fine line between having a calamity that is useless and a situation that raises the tension.
I’d say something about how loan words are cool, but that would imply we have any plans to give them back ;)
You’ve loaned an interesting mix of German words:
Blitzkrieg
Schadenfreude
Kindergarten
Weltschmerz
Angst
Yeah, “angst”/”angsty” has come to mean, more or less, “broody” (at least as I tend to see it used/use it). Often as a more dramatic form of broodiness.
It’s German broodiness, so it’s automatically a more dramatic version … LOL.
Excellent points. I agree, calamity in itself is a lack of tension, and tension is what a story needs.
The truth is, knowing the worst *will* happen can be more a kind of relief, that there’s nothing left to do. We’ve all seen characters like that, that find a serenity in that — which isn’t tension at all, although letting go of worry and getting to that peace would be a classic conflict. It’s getting past the calamity itself to whatever scope of hope there is that turns it back into story material, whether it’s still having a small thing to fight for or (paradoxically) the inner struggle to stop struggling.
This is a really useful article for me, because I love “Man vs Nature” conflicts and those often tends to involve calamities. I really struggled with that in earlier outlines of my current story, and I’m not sure I managed to satisfactorily solve the issue. Thank you for explaining the problem and the possible solutions so clearly, that’ll be a big help when revising.
The trick is you gotta divide it up so it’s “man vs a lot of little natures” ;)
Glad you enjoyed the article!
At that point, there’s no suspense, just inevitable doom and gloom.
I think this is why I find horror films like Heredity and the Babadook more depressing than frightening.
I haven’t seen those two, but I am very familiar with horror stories that lack suspense because there never seems to be a question of the outcome.
You mean like most slasher flicks?
Good example. With slasher flicks, you can tell in the first ten or so minutes who will die and who will survive. Still, they can be interesting depending on how people get killed and how everything develops.
I’m really glad not to have read those sorts of stories that the article highlights, then. Although I might have to if I end up struggling to generate meaningful conflict.
I like the distinction here, that tension is more about uncertainty than the stakes itself. A related phenomenon I have been thinking about lately is the question of why higher stakes stories are often less interesting.
Is there an inverse to calamity in which the stakes are so high that the heroes obviously have to win?
Sort of. Stakes don’t have the same cut off the way tension does at the 100% mark. That said, lower stakes can sometimes be higher tension precisely because we can more easily believe that a side character will die than the main hero. Its a balancing act though, as once the stakes go too low, they stop mattering at all.
At the same time, raising the stakes above a certain point just doesn’t do anything. Once you tell me the villain will destroy the planet, upping that to the solar system doesn’t mean much.
The thing that strikes me about this definition of calamity is that it’s dependent upon the point of view. Take “A Song of Ice and Fire” as an example. From one point of view an event is high drama, with lots of action and tension; from another point of view (say, a relative reading about it weeks later) it’s mere calamity, as nothing can be done at this point.
I think the best way to deal with calamity, though, is as part of the setting. Take the book “Sea Wolf”. The main character is kidnapped (occurs in the first page, so no real spoiler here), and is completely unable to do anything about it. Being kidnapped doesn’t contribute much tension, it merely serves to highlight how inescapable those things which create tension are. The tension derives from other sources. LOTR does this as well, treating….well, the entire back story as one long calamity, which serves to illustrate the importance of the Quest without the characters being able to do anything about any of it. Aragorn’s actions at the start of “The Two Towers” could serve as an illustration of how a character can deal with calamity–he was frustrate that he couldn’t do anything to resolve the issue, and ultimately had to choose between various bad options.
A calamity does never allow for the characters to do something about it. Something might be or look unavoidable at first, but the story is either about what you do after that thing happened (like a volcano errupting – you can’t do anything about that, but the story can focus on what people do afterwards) or it is not as unavoidable as it looks at first (it seems as if the aliens can’t be defeated, but then someone finds their weakness). ‘At this point’ suggests that the calamity is none, because the characters (at least some of them) can eventually do something.
I believe you’re reading that phrase too literally, and apart from the context in which I wrote it. What I meant by that phrase was that the event was in the past, and while they may have been able to do something about it earlier, at the point where they hear about it the event has occurred and is irrevocable. The heir is gone, the army is defeated, and the character is faced with the stark reality that there’s nothing they can do to avoid disaster. A lot of characters in ASOIAF hear about disasters after the fact, without having any capacity to affect the outcome, as a result of the communication methods in the story.
On the other hand we have tv shows where the protagonist(s) avoid catastrophic event after catastrophic event, depriving the plot of stakes unless is another extinction event to avoid. I always laughed at the new Charmed first episode when the sisters defeated a high demon lord, thus stopping the Apocalypse(tm).
At least Dragon Ball set the baseline in a martial arts tournament before bringing in galaxy destroyer aliens.
If you start with the first stories of Dragonball, it starts with Son Goku being found and accompanying Bulma on a trip to find the Dragon Balls. The tournaments come after he’s had his professional training.
So no Galaxy-destroyer-super-saiyan until later.
Power creep is a thing, but they should be careful on putting the stakes where they belong (inside a vampire’s chest). As some articles said before, an ineffective villain makes an ineffective hero.
No, Son Goku started out as a cute kid with a tail who would turn into a monster in full moon. Then he lost the tail and became more manageable all month round. (By the way, the original characters were based very loosely on those of the Chinese epos “Journey to the West” with Son Goku even being named after the Monkey King.)
Power creep is a big problem in a lot of Shonen anime, not just in Dragonball. The characters become stronger and stronger and at some point, there’s just no way you can really keep the stakes up.
That’s exactly my point, if you set a threat of apocalyptic level in the first episode and it is defeated, where do you go afterwards? back to interpersonal drama about college sororoties? A shonen approach is preferable as long as you don’t fall in the power creep.
Sun Wukong was so extremelly overpowered that it would be a poor character for an actual show, it is a common flaw of mythical heroes like Hercules or Paul Bunyan
I’m not disagreeing. In a series, you need to build up the stakes bit by bit as the characters grow. It’s extremely hard to lower the stakes without losing the audience. The only time it can work is if you exchange outside big stakes for personal big stakes if – and only if – a character is so loved by the audience that they’ll be invested in that, too.
The problem especially with Dragonball (but also other Shonen anime), though, is that Son Goku is the only one who grows that much, so all other characters he fights with over time fall by the wayside in a while. The question in later stages of the story is more ‘how long will it take until Son Goku goes all out’ and less ‘will he defeat the villain.’
Sun Wukong isn’t really the main character of Journey to the West, though, is he? The monk he accompanies is. Sun Wukong is the extremely overpowered servant who could solve all problems if the other let him.
I’m so glad I saw this in the end of year post, it is very related to one of my plots! There is a lot of calamity in it, and I thought because it was the most dangerous element of setting, I should be basing the plot round it. It kept me at a dead end for a few years and now my brain is opening up to what is actually interesting and a story in this setting~
Yes, it’s a bit of a grimm setting, but I want to find the light in it and things like how the character emotionally copes with not having enough food, of being in an unsafe environment, they are way more interesting than how unsafe the village is when she can do nothing about it. Finding ways to represent that through self care, finding hopes and trying to improve their little corner of the world – it’s not just flavour, that is the plot! (Just because it’s going to be in a universe where other characters are fighting battles, dealing with cults ruling government and running from dragons, doesn’t mean it can’t be about crafting to survive the ongoing apocalypse.)