Here are two quotes from (wait for it) Frank Zappa. (They seem to be variants of the same quote).

(1) “Music without the ebb and flow would be like
“watching a film with only good guys in it”.

(2) “The creation and destruction of harmonic and
‘statistical’ tensions is essential
to the maintenance of compositional drama.
Any composition (or improvisation) which
remains consistent and ‘regular’ throughout is,
for me, equivalent to watching a movie
with only ‘good guys’ in it,
or eating grass for the rest of your life”.

Well, he’s not wrong. I’m sure you can apply these comments to your own work, but I’m gonna ruminate on it anyway a while yet, so you’ve been warned.

I came across this quote in a musical context, about the tools of emotional movement in musical composition, specifically anent the role of major vs minor musical keys. But all narrative structures of any sort are dynamic — they demand movement and change to engage our interest. Without that, they devolve into a monotone, a chant, a background noise.

As a writer creating story incident, I see this in any number of ways, from simple story conversations that expose plans, to casual encounters set up between strangers unknown (so far) to the reader, to vast shadowy conspiracies that surface, wave a few tentacles, and subside into obscurity. The actions of the story plot may not strictly require all this apparent activity, but the emotions of the reader do. It’s the reader that matters — never forget that — and he needs a story environment that has a life and a feel of reality of its own.

There’s always a temptation to shrink the story to its core players, because they’re the ones you-the-author really care about, they’re the primary active players, they’re the ones who may have a presence in later entries in the longer story. But if you do that, you risk the fate of some cozies, where all the focus devolves into a denser and denser cluster of characters, Zappa’s “good guys”, like the shrinking of a black hole. Death by sugar without salt. The eating of Zappa’s grass.

It can take a lot of attention to manipulate story in this particular way. But experience has taught me that widening the story world always pays dividends, not just for the rhythms and emotions with which it seduces the reader, but in the sheer expansion of possibilities for plot and character. {Within reason of course — attention spans and character lists are not infinite, and needing encyclopedic trots for your 20-book world is… undignified, in my view.}

Do you feel the directorial wand in your hand as you fabulate your tales, frustrating and then satisfying your readers as you point their attention to your exposed cards, while you hide the rest of your hand to surprise them with later? I have to admit I get a kick out of that. I don’t know what’s in those cards myself, a lot of the time, until I find I need to. As long as the story moves with rhythm and purpose, it’s alive, and that’s the goal. That’s what I care about.