The Scale talks about the largest stakes in a work, but that hardly means its the only stakes, or sometimes its not even the most interesting stakes at play in a book. Showing the “personal” side to a conflict draws out and develops character in a way that a purely epic conflict doesn’t always manage. Or, as you did with Paks, using the small stakes as the lever and the agent of larger changes, larger stakes. Indeed.

So in both the early Paks books and the later ones, characters are faced with choices whose possible consequences they cannot fully know. As they move through the story, the implications of their choices become more obvious, at more levels. Paksenarrion herself, in the first books, started out just wanting to get away from home and become a hero. (The “I’ll show you, just you wait!” attitude of the rebellious adolescent, something I lived through.) Yet as she progressed, her decisions affected more and more people–at higher and higher levels of power, in more than one realm. She grew from rebellious teenager to catalyst for drastic change. The current group started with that situation and moved on–considering the interactions of those effects in both neighboring and distant lands. It’s clear also (clearer in this year’s book than before) that something else is going on–the characters feel that, but haven’t figured it out. With two books more to come, I’m not giving spoilers, but the stakes rise up…um…pretty darn high.

Yet for me, for a book to work, it can’t be all empire v. empire, or supermen against monsters…it has to be personal. It works through the characters–their motivations, arising from their innate characteristics and their experiences. It matters who they are, what they think and feel and do, the precise details of what they experience.

For me, when it gets too cosmic–then it loses intensity as a story. The universe will cease to exist if Superhero A doesn’t achieve Goal X in someone’s blockbuster? Ho-hum. It’s not a real universe anyway; it’s just a bunch of pages. That can happen at almost any level, when the writer’s desire to enlarge the story’s importance by raising stakes is greater than the writer’s ability to make the story equally deep to readers. In other words, the height of the stakes must be balanced by the depth of the character foundation–the complexity and believability of the characters. Had Leiber tried to overload Ill Met in Lankhmar with cosmic significance, the book would have made Fafhrd and the Mouser unbelievable–mere plastic playing pieces in a morality tale. At their level, they could only play on the small board. Leiber had more sense; he kept them where they played extremely well.

At the same time, the lower level stakes need to be included in the higher stakes stories. They ground the story, they keep the complexity of the situation in front of the reader, they show how apparently small stakes morph into greater ones as characters maneuver…how a father’s desire to reach out to another family through marriage has perilous consequences a generation later, for instance.