A while ago now, I sent this diagram to kalez in an attempt to explain to him why I was moving away from setting all of my stories in the same continuity, and was instead going to start treating all of my stories as standalone works that never referenced one another.
Now that some time has passed and I've written a small buttload of stuff under both models, here are my thoughts on the pros and cons of each.
(And, to be clear: we're not talking about direct sequels, like in the case of Harry Potter books 1-7. We're talking more along the lines of the Marvel Cinematic Universe here. There's gonna be a lot of MCU talk in this post, in fact, but I'll try to keep it pretty superficial and spoiler-light.)
Pros to setting many stories in the same world:
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It's really fun to have John Travolta walking by in the background. Which is to say: it's fun to have a character/element from one story appear in another story, even if it's just done as an inconsequential little nod to the fact that both stories are happening in the same world as each other.
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If you can assume that readers have already read all the previous works in this world, then it saves a bunch of time on exposition.
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I unironically enjoy shaggy dog stories, and bruh: setting a lot stories in the same universe can get to a point where it reaches Webcomic levels of going on massive divergences from the main plot. Like, honestly: Thor Ragnarok didn't have to happen for the MCU to be what it is, but the level of pointlessness that that movie started on is kind of why it was even more fun to watch Thor and Hulk punch things while being snarky at each other for two hours.
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The process of "getting started" on writing each additional story is much easier when you already have some footing in the story's world. To use a slightly mixed metaphor: starting an elaborate drawing on a blank canvas might be intimidating since you don't know where to begin, whereas drawing a new page of a comic based on the comic's previous pages gives you an easier frame of reference.
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If you're writing multiple stories set in the same world/continuity, then there's probably something that drew you to that world/continuity in the first place. Maybe it was that you really liked the setting you'd established and you just didn't feel like leaving. Maybe you really liked some of the characters, and wanted them to stick around for future works. Maybe there are elements of the world, like a magic system or a history or an overarching conflict, that you want to keep exploring beyond the scope of what one story would cover. In my opinion, "Because I like it here" is actually a very solid reason to stick to a world :3
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If you can assume that readers have already read all the previous works in this world, then you can build to some very interesting stories that would be harder to arrive at in a standalone work. For example: I wrote a story called Meanwhile in Baghdad as the 'crowning finale' to my shared continuity, which drew on previous works that ranged from flash fiction to novellas, and magical realism philosophizing to teenagers throwing petty tantrums to psychological thriller about a cult leader who sees ghosts. The variety of arcs needed for Meanwhile in Baghdad's backstory could not have been done as a (reasonable) single narrative: for my favorite story in that continuity to exist, it had to have been the conclusion to all of the other stories that had been built before it.
Cons to setting many stories in the same world:
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Readers who liked one story a lot may feel like it becomes 'lessened' when characters/elements from it pop up in a different story that they don't like as much—or even in one that they do like but for different reasons. For example, I liked the movie Black Panther: I felt that the characters and settings were a breath of fresh air in the MCU, where the characters had been starting to get stale and the aesthetics were starting to get samey. I also kind of liked Infinity War: seeing aaaall of these storylines and superheroes finally link up was pretty neat. But what I did not like was when all those superheroes in Infinity War took a trip to Wakanda. It was like, "Tch, maaaan. I liked Black Panther because it felt different to the others. Now you've made it all homogeneous again. I don't even care about this big cgi fight anymore. It might as well be taking place in literally any other big empty field in the world."
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When you have a lot of stories that don't have an inherent "order" that they should be read in, it becomes harder to write to an audience. Someone reading your story might have read the six stories that came before it, or they might not have, or they might have read just two of them that they thought looked more interesting, or they might have read a different two, or they might have read them all but then forgotten most of it. Who knows: they might even be reading in the future, and have read a story that you haven't even written yet. Though not insurmountable, exposition is a much harder balancing act when you don't know a reader's knowledge of prior (or even future) works.
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As you add more "rules" to the canon of your universe, it can become easy to corner yourself. Got a new idea for a cool bit of magic? Well, if it conflicts with the rules for magic that you've already been using, then you might be sol. Timelines especially can be killers here: back when I was putting all of my stories into the same continuity, I can't even count how many times I was like, "Oh wait, John can't show up and talk to Alice right now like I wanted him to, because we've already established that on this date and at this time, John would be [at some other far away location / busy going through the events of another story / dead]."
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Depending on the types of stories you're telling, the Superman In Gotham Dilemma may become a real problem. (i.e.: Why doesn't Superman clean up Gotham in like, an afternoon, if he's so powerful and justicey and he exists in the same world as Batman does? Surely Batman should be in favor of this too. You can "solve" this type of problem by just never addressing it, but like, it's definitely odd.)
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If you set a strong enough precident for crossovers being an option, it may undermine any future works that you do want to write as standalones. This is escalated even further by including things such as multiverses and metafiction. As one example that's happened over the course of just 2 works: now that we have Deltarune (a game that plays on the elements of Undertale but isn't a direct/explicit continuation), I suspect that Toby Fox will never be able to make another game ever again that theorists won't try to connect to the world of Undertale somehow.
Pros to keeping stories independent of each other:
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Handling exposition in a standalone work is much easier, because you know exactly how much your reader will know about your world: nothing. (Unless someone has spoiled them about it of course, but, at that point you're off the hook, so whatever.)
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With every new story, you get a clean break from past works. You have "permission" to be completely fresh and original, and not to worry if it clashes anything else.
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Standalone works have more artistic integrity than open-ended works. I know that's pretentious as fuck to say, but like... I'm right. fite me. fwiw, I do literally mean "integrity" in the sense of being structurally sound and complete. Whether we think it's good or bad, we can talk about George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four in its entirety, and evaluate its artistic merit from start to finish. With the MCU, we're not working with an atomic, completed thing, and so we're only ever evaluating the messily stuck-together parts of it, with a lot of shoulder-shrugging and speculation as to how future entries into the canon might improve or mess up how we see the current works. Breaking Bad lost artistic integrity as soon as Better Call Saul was announced, even if you think that Better Call Saul was artistically stronger, because as soon as a spinoff was announced, Breaking Bad lost its status as a closed body of work.
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Relatedly: having standalone works adds more finality and umph to a story. In my opinion, a climax is much more nail-biting if you know that after the last page of the book, nothing in the world can change what's happened. Compare this to if you were reading the climax of book 3 in a series of 5; the climax of 3 is probably still engaging, but in the back of your mind, you know that there's a lot of time for the events in book 3 to get mitigated during books 4 and 5. Now compare that to book 3 in a completely open-ended storyverse, and it feels... not "inconsequential", but definitely less bitey. I watched Infinity War with two friends. Me and Friend A thought that the ending was bold and cool. Then Friend B, laughing at us, told us that there was going to be an Infinity War 2, which made me and Friend A groan very loudly because the existence of a Part 2 pretty much automatically meant that that there was no way in hell the ending of Part 1 was going to completely stick.
Cons to keeping stories independent of each other:
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Readers who liked a story may be disappointed that there isn't more of that story out there. On a marketing level, that's definitely something to give thought to. But frankly, on an artistic level, I find this to be weak justification for a continuation; I'm a proponent of the phrase, "Leave 'em wanting more." If you told your story well enough that people are demanding a continuation, then you probably (probably) told a really effective story, and in my opinion, that maybe means you should think twice about messing with it.
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Keeping stories as standalones is definitely not in vogue right now. Focken eeeverything that possibly can be is an open-ended series at the moment. It'll probably hurt your elevator pitch if you unambiguously say, "No fuck you it's just this one. Zero chance of a sequel ever happening, mate."
Overall, I wouldn't say that one approach is 'better' than the other: both sides have valid merits to offer. To my tastes (which are v literary and gay and desirous-of-trying-new-things) I think that keeping all the stories apart is the way to go. For someone like my fren kalez (who is building a very big and very well thought out universe/work-of-art), I think that putting all the stories into the same world is totally the right move.
Submitted December 10, 2018 at 10:01AM by Ray_Thompson https://ift.tt/2PuXZtx
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