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Avoiding spectacle creep
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It's common in stories for spectacle to build over time. Each story arc, the stakes get higher, the drama gets more intense, the villains get more dangerous, and so on. For a story with a fixed endpoint, that's fine. So long I know where I'm going, it's just a matter of pacing the spectacle increase.
But for an ongoing story, that poses a challenge, particularly in a genre where the stakes start high. The superhero saves the city, then the world, then the universe, then the multiverse, then defeats every villain from every universe simultaneously while blindfolded and in a full body cast, and then what? How can I lower the stakes from there (or ideally, much earlier) without the audience getting bored?
How can I tell an ongoing story without falling victim to spectacle creep?
creative-writing series
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Galastel
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It's common in stories for spectacle to build over time. Each story arc, the stakes get higher, the drama gets more intense, the villains get more dangerous, and so on. For a story with a fixed endpoint, that's fine. So long I know where I'm going, it's just a matter of pacing the spectacle increase.
But for an ongoing story, that poses a challenge, particularly in a genre where the stakes start high. The superhero saves the city, then the world, then the universe, then the multiverse, then defeats every villain from every universe simultaneously while blindfolded and in a full body cast, and then what? How can I lower the stakes from there (or ideally, much earlier) without the audience getting bored?
How can I tell an ongoing story without falling victim to spectacle creep?
creative-writing series
edited 35 mins ago
Galastel
17.4k345100
asked 1 hour ago
Mnemonic
1112
New contributor
Mnemonic is a new contributor to this site. Take care in asking for clarification, commenting, and answering.
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Related: writing.stackexchange.com/questions/39011/…
– Galastel
1 hour ago
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up vote
2
down vote
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up vote
2
down vote
favorite
It's common in stories for spectacle to build over time. Each story arc, the stakes get higher, the drama gets more intense, the villains get more dangerous, and so on. For a story with a fixed endpoint, that's fine. So long I know where I'm going, it's just a matter of pacing the spectacle increase.
But for an ongoing story, that poses a challenge, particularly in a genre where the stakes start high. The superhero saves the city, then the world, then the universe, then the multiverse, then defeats every villain from every universe simultaneously while blindfolded and in a full body cast, and then what? How can I lower the stakes from there (or ideally, much earlier) without the audience getting bored?
How can I tell an ongoing story without falling victim to spectacle creep?
creative-writing series
edited 35 mins ago
Galastel
17.4k345100
asked 1 hour ago
Mnemonic
1112
New contributor
Mnemonic is a new contributor to this site. Take care in asking for clarification, commenting, and answering.
Check out our Code of Conduct.
It's common in stories for spectacle to build over time. Each story arc, the stakes get higher, the drama gets more intense, the villains get more dangerous, and so on. For a story with a fixed endpoint, that's fine. So long I know where I'm going, it's just a matter of pacing the spectacle increase.
But for an ongoing story, that poses a challenge, particularly in a genre where the stakes start high. The superhero saves the city, then the world, then the universe, then the multiverse, then defeats every villain from every universe simultaneously while blindfolded and in a full body cast, and then what? How can I lower the stakes from there (or ideally, much earlier) without the audience getting bored?
How can I tell an ongoing story without falling victim to spectacle creep?
creative-writing series
creative-writing series
edited 35 mins ago
Galastel
17.4k345100
asked 1 hour ago
Mnemonic
1112
New contributor
Mnemonic is a new contributor to this site. Take care in asking for clarification, commenting, and answering.
Check out our Code of Conduct.
edited 35 mins ago
Galastel
17.4k345100
asked 1 hour ago
Mnemonic
1112
New contributor
Mnemonic is a new contributor to this site. Take care in asking for clarification, commenting, and answering.
Check out our Code of Conduct.
edited 35 mins ago
Galastel
17.4k345100
edited 35 mins ago
Galastel
17.4k345100
edited 35 mins ago
Galastel
17.4k345100
17.4k345100
asked 1 hour ago
Mnemonic
1112
New contributor
Mnemonic is a new contributor to this site. Take care in asking for clarification, commenting, and answering.
Check out our Code of Conduct.
asked 1 hour ago
Mnemonic
1112
asked 1 hour ago
Mnemonic
1112
1112
New contributor
Mnemonic is a new contributor to this site. Take care in asking for clarification, commenting, and answering.
Check out our Code of Conduct.
New contributor
Mnemonic is a new contributor to this site. Take care in asking for clarification, commenting, and answering.
Check out our Code of Conduct.
Mnemonic is a new contributor to this site. Take care in asking for clarification, commenting, and answering.
Check out our Code of Conduct.
Related: writing.stackexchange.com/questions/39011/…
– Galastel
1 hour ago
add a comment |Â
Related: writing.stackexchange.com/questions/39011/…
– Galastel
1 hour ago
Related: writing.stackexchange.com/questions/39011/…
– Galastel
1 hour ago
Related: writing.stackexchange.com/questions/39011/…
– Galastel
1 hour ago
add a comment |Â
3 Answers
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up vote
1
down vote
I'm sure many people here are familiar enough with episodes of Doctor Who feel 2005 onwards to know they faced this problem. Here's my advice: do what the series did from 1963 to 1989 instead. In other words, don't try giving each arc higher stakes than the last one at all; just write each arc in its own terms, building on old continuity only when you have an idea for how to do so that's good in some respect other than raising stakes.
answered 52 mins ago
J.G.
4,66911124
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up vote
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There are more things you can do with stakes than escalate ad nauseam.
First, you can vary the threat. For example, Buffy jokes more than once about "saving the world again". The difference comes from saving the world from different things; a new threat might require a new approach, pose a tougher challenge than the previous threat, etc.
Second, there might be personal stakes in addition to the "save the world" stakes: save the world without letting mum find out my secret identity, save the world and my lover whom the Big Bad has put in danger to distract me, save the world from my best friend who's gone crazy. (All from Buffy again, since I've already started with that example).
Third, once in a while, you can lower the stakes. How about helping a single person who's stuck in an abusive relationship? Or not letting any baddies interfere with a friend's wedding?
Fourth, your hero might get de-powered. They suffered a serious wound in the final battle of one battle, so in the next story, they're still recovering, and it hinders their ability to deal with the threat of the day. Or they're going through some emotional stuff. Or last time they got fined for damage to buildings, roads, etc., so now they need to save the world without wreaking half a city in the process. Done too often, this trope becomes annoying (as do most others), but once in a while - it adds interest, not only by making the challenge more challenging, but also by showing the hero as not all-powerful. The audience's sense of danger to the hero increases, everything becomes more tense and more exciting.
answered 36 mins ago
Galastel
17.4k345100
add a comment |Â
up vote
1
down vote
Alice: Do you remember how the villain from a month ago always said how he wanted to kill us?
Bob: Hm-mm?
Alice: Well, this new villain wants to kill us ... and murder our dog, too!
A solution could be:
Avoid falling into the trap completely
Don't set up a crescendo. Decide what's the story arc you wanna tell and stick with it. Make the story compelling, build interesting characters, and when the story eventually ends and the big bad is defeated, you'll still have your characters left.
They don't have to face a bigger challenge to be interesting - the reader that followed you up to this point will already be invested in their lives, their feelings, their personal struggles. Sure thing, if you're writing an action series or an epic fantasy it will be difficult - if not outright impossible - to build a second story arch based on character introspection alone, but this doesn't keep you for carrying on this kind of narration.
Maybe there will be another challenge, but you don't need to set up an escalation. The other challenge may be just different in nature.
Spoiler about Sanderson mistborn series (The Final Empire - the Well of Ascension) ahead:
In The Final Empire, the main characters effectively dethrone an evil, immortal almost god-like emperor - the stakes being pretty high.
It's true that in the following book the stakes do get higher (as there are hints of a prophecy and things do get worse), but I would argue that the Well of Ascension is mainly focused on the difficulties of running the capital city after the empire is gone.
Now, running and protecting a city shouldn't be more difficult than killing an immortal emperor-god, and yet it's interesting since there are a lot of themes involved, and space to explore characters already presented in the first book.
So, don't set up a worse challenge - chances are that the first challenge was pretty difficult in the first place - set up a different one. Better still, carry your character development forward.
Your hero may as well be an immortal superhero at the end of book 1, but he/she will still have to face personal issues inherently connected to being human (and if he/she's not human, with being alive).
A lot of story arcs end with the hero getting the love interest and stomping the evil guy, but few tells us what happens when you have to keep a relationship (compare this as how few books deal with the struggle of administrating the world and preventing an evil guy from resurfacing).
Ask yourself:
- Are my characters all right with everything that happened in story arc 1?
- Do they have some unfinished business to attend to?
- Did they meet their goals? If so, are they content with their new life, or do they strive to some other goal?
- Are there still problems in need of fixing in my setting? Are there political struggles? Is there space for improvement? If the answer is no, why is that? Did I overlook something?
Also, remember that story arcs don't need to be close to each other, at least not necessarily. That's something that happens a lot in tv series, cartoons or animes, but it's just because it maximizes viewer attention without having to deal with uneventful periods or character growing up, or getting older, or changing alltogether. If you feel like it, you can put a time gap of years, even, between a story and the next - just remember that your characters will be a little different as time passes.
answered 24 mins ago
Liquid
2,543527
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3 Answers
3
active
oldest
votes
3 Answers
3
active
oldest
votes
active
oldest
votes
active
oldest
votes
up vote
1
down vote
I'm sure many people here are familiar enough with episodes of Doctor Who feel 2005 onwards to know they faced this problem. Here's my advice: do what the series did from 1963 to 1989 instead. In other words, don't try giving each arc higher stakes than the last one at all; just write each arc in its own terms, building on old continuity only when you have an idea for how to do so that's good in some respect other than raising stakes.
answered 52 mins ago
J.G.
4,66911124
add a comment |Â
up vote
1
down vote
I'm sure many people here are familiar enough with episodes of Doctor Who feel 2005 onwards to know they faced this problem. Here's my advice: do what the series did from 1963 to 1989 instead. In other words, don't try giving each arc higher stakes than the last one at all; just write each arc in its own terms, building on old continuity only when you have an idea for how to do so that's good in some respect other than raising stakes.
answered 52 mins ago
J.G.
4,66911124
add a comment |Â
up vote
1
down vote
up vote
1
down vote
I'm sure many people here are familiar enough with episodes of Doctor Who feel 2005 onwards to know they faced this problem. Here's my advice: do what the series did from 1963 to 1989 instead. In other words, don't try giving each arc higher stakes than the last one at all; just write each arc in its own terms, building on old continuity only when you have an idea for how to do so that's good in some respect other than raising stakes.
answered 52 mins ago
J.G.
4,66911124
I'm sure many people here are familiar enough with episodes of Doctor Who feel 2005 onwards to know they faced this problem. Here's my advice: do what the series did from 1963 to 1989 instead. In other words, don't try giving each arc higher stakes than the last one at all; just write each arc in its own terms, building on old continuity only when you have an idea for how to do so that's good in some respect other than raising stakes.
answered 52 mins ago
J.G.
4,66911124
answered 52 mins ago
J.G.
4,66911124
answered 52 mins ago
J.G.
4,66911124
answered 52 mins ago
J.G.
4,66911124
4,66911124
add a comment |Â
add a comment |Â
up vote
1
down vote
There are more things you can do with stakes than escalate ad nauseam.
First, you can vary the threat. For example, Buffy jokes more than once about "saving the world again". The difference comes from saving the world from different things; a new threat might require a new approach, pose a tougher challenge than the previous threat, etc.
Second, there might be personal stakes in addition to the "save the world" stakes: save the world without letting mum find out my secret identity, save the world and my lover whom the Big Bad has put in danger to distract me, save the world from my best friend who's gone crazy. (All from Buffy again, since I've already started with that example).
Third, once in a while, you can lower the stakes. How about helping a single person who's stuck in an abusive relationship? Or not letting any baddies interfere with a friend's wedding?
Fourth, your hero might get de-powered. They suffered a serious wound in the final battle of one battle, so in the next story, they're still recovering, and it hinders their ability to deal with the threat of the day. Or they're going through some emotional stuff. Or last time they got fined for damage to buildings, roads, etc., so now they need to save the world without wreaking half a city in the process. Done too often, this trope becomes annoying (as do most others), but once in a while - it adds interest, not only by making the challenge more challenging, but also by showing the hero as not all-powerful. The audience's sense of danger to the hero increases, everything becomes more tense and more exciting.
answered 36 mins ago
Galastel
17.4k345100
add a comment |Â
up vote
1
down vote
There are more things you can do with stakes than escalate ad nauseam.
First, you can vary the threat. For example, Buffy jokes more than once about "saving the world again". The difference comes from saving the world from different things; a new threat might require a new approach, pose a tougher challenge than the previous threat, etc.
Second, there might be personal stakes in addition to the "save the world" stakes: save the world without letting mum find out my secret identity, save the world and my lover whom the Big Bad has put in danger to distract me, save the world from my best friend who's gone crazy. (All from Buffy again, since I've already started with that example).
Third, once in a while, you can lower the stakes. How about helping a single person who's stuck in an abusive relationship? Or not letting any baddies interfere with a friend's wedding?
Fourth, your hero might get de-powered. They suffered a serious wound in the final battle of one battle, so in the next story, they're still recovering, and it hinders their ability to deal with the threat of the day. Or they're going through some emotional stuff. Or last time they got fined for damage to buildings, roads, etc., so now they need to save the world without wreaking half a city in the process. Done too often, this trope becomes annoying (as do most others), but once in a while - it adds interest, not only by making the challenge more challenging, but also by showing the hero as not all-powerful. The audience's sense of danger to the hero increases, everything becomes more tense and more exciting.
answered 36 mins ago
Galastel
17.4k345100
add a comment |Â
up vote
1
down vote
up vote
1
down vote
There are more things you can do with stakes than escalate ad nauseam.
First, you can vary the threat. For example, Buffy jokes more than once about "saving the world again". The difference comes from saving the world from different things; a new threat might require a new approach, pose a tougher challenge than the previous threat, etc.
Second, there might be personal stakes in addition to the "save the world" stakes: save the world without letting mum find out my secret identity, save the world and my lover whom the Big Bad has put in danger to distract me, save the world from my best friend who's gone crazy. (All from Buffy again, since I've already started with that example).
Third, once in a while, you can lower the stakes. How about helping a single person who's stuck in an abusive relationship? Or not letting any baddies interfere with a friend's wedding?
Fourth, your hero might get de-powered. They suffered a serious wound in the final battle of one battle, so in the next story, they're still recovering, and it hinders their ability to deal with the threat of the day. Or they're going through some emotional stuff. Or last time they got fined for damage to buildings, roads, etc., so now they need to save the world without wreaking half a city in the process. Done too often, this trope becomes annoying (as do most others), but once in a while - it adds interest, not only by making the challenge more challenging, but also by showing the hero as not all-powerful. The audience's sense of danger to the hero increases, everything becomes more tense and more exciting.
answered 36 mins ago
Galastel
17.4k345100
There are more things you can do with stakes than escalate ad nauseam.
First, you can vary the threat. For example, Buffy jokes more than once about "saving the world again". The difference comes from saving the world from different things; a new threat might require a new approach, pose a tougher challenge than the previous threat, etc.
Second, there might be personal stakes in addition to the "save the world" stakes: save the world without letting mum find out my secret identity, save the world and my lover whom the Big Bad has put in danger to distract me, save the world from my best friend who's gone crazy. (All from Buffy again, since I've already started with that example).
Third, once in a while, you can lower the stakes. How about helping a single person who's stuck in an abusive relationship? Or not letting any baddies interfere with a friend's wedding?
Fourth, your hero might get de-powered. They suffered a serious wound in the final battle of one battle, so in the next story, they're still recovering, and it hinders their ability to deal with the threat of the day. Or they're going through some emotional stuff. Or last time they got fined for damage to buildings, roads, etc., so now they need to save the world without wreaking half a city in the process. Done too often, this trope becomes annoying (as do most others), but once in a while - it adds interest, not only by making the challenge more challenging, but also by showing the hero as not all-powerful. The audience's sense of danger to the hero increases, everything becomes more tense and more exciting.
answered 36 mins ago
Galastel
17.4k345100
answered 36 mins ago
Galastel
17.4k345100
answered 36 mins ago
Galastel
17.4k345100
answered 36 mins ago
Galastel
17.4k345100
17.4k345100
add a comment |Â
add a comment |Â
up vote
1
down vote
Alice: Do you remember how the villain from a month ago always said how he wanted to kill us?
Bob: Hm-mm?
Alice: Well, this new villain wants to kill us ... and murder our dog, too!
A solution could be:
Avoid falling into the trap completely
Don't set up a crescendo. Decide what's the story arc you wanna tell and stick with it. Make the story compelling, build interesting characters, and when the story eventually ends and the big bad is defeated, you'll still have your characters left.
They don't have to face a bigger challenge to be interesting - the reader that followed you up to this point will already be invested in their lives, their feelings, their personal struggles. Sure thing, if you're writing an action series or an epic fantasy it will be difficult - if not outright impossible - to build a second story arch based on character introspection alone, but this doesn't keep you for carrying on this kind of narration.
Maybe there will be another challenge, but you don't need to set up an escalation. The other challenge may be just different in nature.
Spoiler about Sanderson mistborn series (The Final Empire - the Well of Ascension) ahead:
In The Final Empire, the main characters effectively dethrone an evil, immortal almost god-like emperor - the stakes being pretty high.
It's true that in the following book the stakes do get higher (as there are hints of a prophecy and things do get worse), but I would argue that the Well of Ascension is mainly focused on the difficulties of running the capital city after the empire is gone.
Now, running and protecting a city shouldn't be more difficult than killing an immortal emperor-god, and yet it's interesting since there are a lot of themes involved, and space to explore characters already presented in the first book.
So, don't set up a worse challenge - chances are that the first challenge was pretty difficult in the first place - set up a different one. Better still, carry your character development forward.
Your hero may as well be an immortal superhero at the end of book 1, but he/she will still have to face personal issues inherently connected to being human (and if he/she's not human, with being alive).
A lot of story arcs end with the hero getting the love interest and stomping the evil guy, but few tells us what happens when you have to keep a relationship (compare this as how few books deal with the struggle of administrating the world and preventing an evil guy from resurfacing).
Ask yourself:
- Are my characters all right with everything that happened in story arc 1?
- Do they have some unfinished business to attend to?
- Did they meet their goals? If so, are they content with their new life, or do they strive to some other goal?
- Are there still problems in need of fixing in my setting? Are there political struggles? Is there space for improvement? If the answer is no, why is that? Did I overlook something?
Also, remember that story arcs don't need to be close to each other, at least not necessarily. That's something that happens a lot in tv series, cartoons or animes, but it's just because it maximizes viewer attention without having to deal with uneventful periods or character growing up, or getting older, or changing alltogether. If you feel like it, you can put a time gap of years, even, between a story and the next - just remember that your characters will be a little different as time passes.
answered 24 mins ago
Liquid
2,543527
add a comment |Â
up vote
1
down vote
Alice: Do you remember how the villain from a month ago always said how he wanted to kill us?
Bob: Hm-mm?
Alice: Well, this new villain wants to kill us ... and murder our dog, too!
A solution could be:
Avoid falling into the trap completely
Don't set up a crescendo. Decide what's the story arc you wanna tell and stick with it. Make the story compelling, build interesting characters, and when the story eventually ends and the big bad is defeated, you'll still have your characters left.
They don't have to face a bigger challenge to be interesting - the reader that followed you up to this point will already be invested in their lives, their feelings, their personal struggles. Sure thing, if you're writing an action series or an epic fantasy it will be difficult - if not outright impossible - to build a second story arch based on character introspection alone, but this doesn't keep you for carrying on this kind of narration.
Maybe there will be another challenge, but you don't need to set up an escalation. The other challenge may be just different in nature.
Spoiler about Sanderson mistborn series (The Final Empire - the Well of Ascension) ahead:
In The Final Empire, the main characters effectively dethrone an evil, immortal almost god-like emperor - the stakes being pretty high.
It's true that in the following book the stakes do get higher (as there are hints of a prophecy and things do get worse), but I would argue that the Well of Ascension is mainly focused on the difficulties of running the capital city after the empire is gone.
Now, running and protecting a city shouldn't be more difficult than killing an immortal emperor-god, and yet it's interesting since there are a lot of themes involved, and space to explore characters already presented in the first book.
So, don't set up a worse challenge - chances are that the first challenge was pretty difficult in the first place - set up a different one. Better still, carry your character development forward.
Your hero may as well be an immortal superhero at the end of book 1, but he/she will still have to face personal issues inherently connected to being human (and if he/she's not human, with being alive).
A lot of story arcs end with the hero getting the love interest and stomping the evil guy, but few tells us what happens when you have to keep a relationship (compare this as how few books deal with the struggle of administrating the world and preventing an evil guy from resurfacing).
Ask yourself:
- Are my characters all right with everything that happened in story arc 1?
- Do they have some unfinished business to attend to?
- Did they meet their goals? If so, are they content with their new life, or do they strive to some other goal?
- Are there still problems in need of fixing in my setting? Are there political struggles? Is there space for improvement? If the answer is no, why is that? Did I overlook something?
Also, remember that story arcs don't need to be close to each other, at least not necessarily. That's something that happens a lot in tv series, cartoons or animes, but it's just because it maximizes viewer attention without having to deal with uneventful periods or character growing up, or getting older, or changing alltogether. If you feel like it, you can put a time gap of years, even, between a story and the next - just remember that your characters will be a little different as time passes.
answered 24 mins ago
Liquid
2,543527
add a comment |Â
up vote
1
down vote
up vote
1
down vote
Alice: Do you remember how the villain from a month ago always said how he wanted to kill us?
Bob: Hm-mm?
Alice: Well, this new villain wants to kill us ... and murder our dog, too!
A solution could be:
Avoid falling into the trap completely
Don't set up a crescendo. Decide what's the story arc you wanna tell and stick with it. Make the story compelling, build interesting characters, and when the story eventually ends and the big bad is defeated, you'll still have your characters left.
They don't have to face a bigger challenge to be interesting - the reader that followed you up to this point will already be invested in their lives, their feelings, their personal struggles. Sure thing, if you're writing an action series or an epic fantasy it will be difficult - if not outright impossible - to build a second story arch based on character introspection alone, but this doesn't keep you for carrying on this kind of narration.
Maybe there will be another challenge, but you don't need to set up an escalation. The other challenge may be just different in nature.
Spoiler about Sanderson mistborn series (The Final Empire - the Well of Ascension) ahead:
In The Final Empire, the main characters effectively dethrone an evil, immortal almost god-like emperor - the stakes being pretty high.
It's true that in the following book the stakes do get higher (as there are hints of a prophecy and things do get worse), but I would argue that the Well of Ascension is mainly focused on the difficulties of running the capital city after the empire is gone.
Now, running and protecting a city shouldn't be more difficult than killing an immortal emperor-god, and yet it's interesting since there are a lot of themes involved, and space to explore characters already presented in the first book.
So, don't set up a worse challenge - chances are that the first challenge was pretty difficult in the first place - set up a different one. Better still, carry your character development forward.
Your hero may as well be an immortal superhero at the end of book 1, but he/she will still have to face personal issues inherently connected to being human (and if he/she's not human, with being alive).
A lot of story arcs end with the hero getting the love interest and stomping the evil guy, but few tells us what happens when you have to keep a relationship (compare this as how few books deal with the struggle of administrating the world and preventing an evil guy from resurfacing).
Ask yourself:
- Are my characters all right with everything that happened in story arc 1?
- Do they have some unfinished business to attend to?
- Did they meet their goals? If so, are they content with their new life, or do they strive to some other goal?
- Are there still problems in need of fixing in my setting? Are there political struggles? Is there space for improvement? If the answer is no, why is that? Did I overlook something?
Also, remember that story arcs don't need to be close to each other, at least not necessarily. That's something that happens a lot in tv series, cartoons or animes, but it's just because it maximizes viewer attention without having to deal with uneventful periods or character growing up, or getting older, or changing alltogether. If you feel like it, you can put a time gap of years, even, between a story and the next - just remember that your characters will be a little different as time passes.
answered 24 mins ago
Liquid
2,543527
Alice: Do you remember how the villain from a month ago always said how he wanted to kill us?
Bob: Hm-mm?
Alice: Well, this new villain wants to kill us ... and murder our dog, too!
A solution could be:
Avoid falling into the trap completely
Don't set up a crescendo. Decide what's the story arc you wanna tell and stick with it. Make the story compelling, build interesting characters, and when the story eventually ends and the big bad is defeated, you'll still have your characters left.
They don't have to face a bigger challenge to be interesting - the reader that followed you up to this point will already be invested in their lives, their feelings, their personal struggles. Sure thing, if you're writing an action series or an epic fantasy it will be difficult - if not outright impossible - to build a second story arch based on character introspection alone, but this doesn't keep you for carrying on this kind of narration.
Maybe there will be another challenge, but you don't need to set up an escalation. The other challenge may be just different in nature.
Spoiler about Sanderson mistborn series (The Final Empire - the Well of Ascension) ahead:
In The Final Empire, the main characters effectively dethrone an evil, immortal almost god-like emperor - the stakes being pretty high.
It's true that in the following book the stakes do get higher (as there are hints of a prophecy and things do get worse), but I would argue that the Well of Ascension is mainly focused on the difficulties of running the capital city after the empire is gone.
Now, running and protecting a city shouldn't be more difficult than killing an immortal emperor-god, and yet it's interesting since there are a lot of themes involved, and space to explore characters already presented in the first book.
So, don't set up a worse challenge - chances are that the first challenge was pretty difficult in the first place - set up a different one. Better still, carry your character development forward.
Your hero may as well be an immortal superhero at the end of book 1, but he/she will still have to face personal issues inherently connected to being human (and if he/she's not human, with being alive).
A lot of story arcs end with the hero getting the love interest and stomping the evil guy, but few tells us what happens when you have to keep a relationship (compare this as how few books deal with the struggle of administrating the world and preventing an evil guy from resurfacing).
Ask yourself:
- Are my characters all right with everything that happened in story arc 1?
- Do they have some unfinished business to attend to?
- Did they meet their goals? If so, are they content with their new life, or do they strive to some other goal?
- Are there still problems in need of fixing in my setting? Are there political struggles? Is there space for improvement? If the answer is no, why is that? Did I overlook something?
Also, remember that story arcs don't need to be close to each other, at least not necessarily. That's something that happens a lot in tv series, cartoons or animes, but it's just because it maximizes viewer attention without having to deal with uneventful periods or character growing up, or getting older, or changing alltogether. If you feel like it, you can put a time gap of years, even, between a story and the next - just remember that your characters will be a little different as time passes.
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Related: writing.stackexchange.com/questions/39011/…
– Galastel
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