Many of us have heard this piece of writing advice: “If you give Frodo a lightsaber, you have to give Sauron the Death Star.” On the surface, this directive sounds plausible. We want to maintain tension, and obviously if you give the good guys a power boost, you’re going to have to give the bad guys an equivalent boost. Anything else would obviously be boring. At its most basic, this idea is correct. A story needs to put the protagonists at a disadvantage in the plot in order to keep the whole thing from feeling like a cakewalk- squishy and a spectacle of only momentary interest. As the saying presents it, though, this principle fails. Why? Because the principle, while true, is not complete; in order to apply this, in order to make sure the power imbalance is present, we must understand not just the relative power of the two new factors but the plot which that power is applied to, must understand what type of power is relevant to the story. Ultimately, tension in a story relies not on general power but on the applicable power of the various sides in the plot’s chosen field¹.

Let me explain.

I do warn you, though, that if you haven’t read The Lord of the Rings you must go read it now, before I spoiler it; I don’t even care if you come back here afterwards.

All plots, fundamentally, can be summarized as a question. For The Lord of the Rings, the question is, “Will the Ring be destroyed in Mount Doom?” Other elements are important, of course, but the plot, at its core, is the uncertainty of outcome in this one area. The subplots- Aragorn’s return to Gondor, the fight for Minas Tirith, etc.- are (conventionally) subsidiaries of this plot, feeding into it, enriching it, making it real. For Pride and Prejudice, the question is, “Will Elizabeth Bennet marry Mr. Darcy?” Other plots, like Jane’s relationship with Mr. Bingley, are important, but ultimately they are subordinate to the main plot. These sub-plot can be analyzed both in context of the larger plot and independently; be careful with them, as sometimes a sub-plot is solvable by a power type that is effectively useless in the main plot.

This main plot of the story is the axis along which power matters. In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo’s romantic perspicacity is entirely irrelevant; in Pride and Prejudice, the same quality is a vital part of Elizabeth’s part in the plot. Her struggles with Mr. Darcy run along an entirely different line than Frodo’s with Sauron (unless you’re a truly deranged re-interpreter). Ignoring, as with all these examples, worldbuilding’s tortured shrieks, giving Elizabeth an AK-47 wouldn’t change the romantic situation at all. The use of an AK-47s, after all, won’t change the opinions of the character involved when it comes to romancing each other. In other words, giving Elizabeth a lightsaber doesn’t necessitate handing Mr. Darcy a Death Star². Giving Elizabeth an intimate understanding of Mr. Darcy, however, would change the plot, because the question is one of relationship, in which such an intimate understanding would matter a whole lot.

Now return to our original saying- lightsabers, Death Stars, you know the drill- and consider it in light of this criterion. Does the lightsaber’s increase to Frodo’s power require a Death Star to compensate?

In the first place, The Lord of the Rings does involve a lot of fighting, described in a very Tolkienesque fashion (which means poetically and sparingly), so we can’t immediately rule it out in the way we could for Austen. The central question of The Lord of the Rings, though, isn’t one of straight-up combat. Assuming we decide the lightsaber can’t just destroy the Ring by itself (which would straight-up end the story right there), the weapon is, frankly, not that useful. Throughout the story, the point of the mission is stealth. A lightsaber would at best make the combat they do encounter a bit easier; at worst, it would draw attention, draw in more foes, and at some point there are too many arrows to block, even if hobbits were precognitive superhumans. If Sauron’s attention were fixed upon them, well, the lightsaber wouldn’t matter. In fact, the only part of the journey I can see the lightsaber having an appreciable effect on is the fight at Weathertop, where it might conceivably preserve Frodo from premature ventilation via Morgul blade- though not if he were paralyzed by the fear of their screams.

Lightsabers, obviously, are impressive weapons, but giving Frodo a lightsaber really doesn’t do anything to make him more powerful in The Lord of the Rings. Why? Because the problems he faces aren’t the type he can cut apart on the field of battle. They’re weariness, temptation, spiritual oppression, starvation, fear, and a whole trove of other torments, to which the physical threat of the orcs is an addition, not a replacement. Adding power to a character, in other words, only matters if it’s a certain kind of power. Mr. Darcy with superhuman strength is right where he started in terms of romance, and Frodo with a lightsaber is just as vulnerable to Sauron as ever, even if he need a few more orcs to bring down once he’s found.

Giving Frodo an all-terrain vehicle with full EM-spectrum invisibility and a 300mph top speed, on the other hand, would definitely matter to the plot balance. It would change his ability to solve his problem: travel distance and stealth. I’m tempted to say you’d have to give Sauron SSMs and advanced sensor arrays, but at that point we’re talking about a story so different from The Lord of the Rings it doesn’t even matter.

What does this all mean for you?

In a story, there are two types of power. The first type is power that plays on the same axis as the plot; the second type is power that doesn’t. ‘Power’ is honestly a non-ideal word for this use; in a romance novel, this ‘power’ could be the ability to understand people. What I mean here by ‘power’ is ‘capability to act’.

The tension of the plot relies, in large part, on the expectation that the protagonist can fail or that he will pay too large of a price. The prince might not succeed in outing the usurper; the lover might destroy his relationship with his family for an ephemeral love affair; the knight might undermine the kingdom out of a guilty passion for the queen (The Once and Future King says ‘hi’, along with a lot of Arthuriana). The character’s faults are here relevant as part of the antagonistic power. If we think of it in terms of two endings, the bad ending has the balance of power tipped notably in its favor, so much so that sometimes we feel its victory inevitable, are reassured that the good ending may triumph only by our understanding that stories can end well no matter how badly they’re going³.

In order to keep this balance tipped (particularly in the reader’s perception, where it really matters; the balance could be decisively tipped towards the good ending, as long as you can convince the reader otherwise without lying), you must understand what parts of the story are relevant to the tension, what parts contribute to the ‘power’ of the bad ending and the good ending respectively. Think of it as a chess board: you can see all the squares, but unless you know what piece is where and what color it is, unless you can tell an empty square from a black piece from a white piece. You can’t tell who is winning.

In the case of Frodo, the bad ending has all sorts of assets on its side: Sauron, the Ring, Frodo’s own exhaustion, starvation, geography, the overwhelming military might of Mordor, the weather, etc. Tolkien spends time building them up, spends time establishing their terror, whether Sauron and the Ring at Amon Hen or the geography of Cirith Ungol or the thousand other foes (animate, inanimate, and internal). The good ending has assets too: the endurance of the hobbits, Aragorn’s nobility, the way Sauron views other’s relationship with power, the wisdom of Gandalf…. All these provide the reader with an arsenal of ‘things that can bring about the good ending’. All of them together, though, bring only a feeling that victory is in the barest way possible. The tension remains: victory may be possible, but the bad ending still looms, barely short of inevitable. I remember the tension the first time I read The Lord of the Rings, and I knew that it ended well when I started reading it⁴.

In summary, find the central question of your plot. If you want to be thorough, remember those sub-plots I mentioned earlier and find their central questions too. Then, figure out what abilities, powers, and knowledge the possible endings, happy and unhappy alike, have. Distinguish between the relevant and the irrelevant, between the parts that matter to the question and the parts that don’t. Remember (here’s something I only hinted at), a character can be their own worst enemy; remember, the antagonist’s foibles can be as important as his strengths (like in Greenmantle for both Von Stumm and his compatriot⁵). Use these to create tension. In this way you can avoid the trap of trying to create tension by adding power without application to the plot, by adding romantic suavity to Legolas when he encounters the Army of the Dead, or of adding power that matters to the plot without counterbalancing it appropriately (as the original bit of advice intends to teach you to avoid).

God bless.

Footnotes

1 – To be very technical here, I actually think that the original advice, taken literally, does work for that specific case, though that doesn’t mean it’s good advice, because the reason it works is the irrelevance of both additions. The problem with the saying that I’m addressing here isn’t its failure to make the point it’s trying to make, it’s that the point it tries to make is over-simplified to the point of being easily deleterious.

I’d also like to point out that the story from which the lightsaber and Death Star originates doesn’t actually place them as equal and opposite in terms of power. Both sides have lightsabers; one side has the Death Star. Furthermore, lightsabers never accomplish the destruction of the Death Star or vice versa. The implication of the saying isn’t even true for Star Wars.

2 – I think I actually want to see this movie, just for the giggles.

3 – This depends on genre, though. Hello, grimdark and horror! Also, note that when I say ‘bad ending’ and ‘good ending’ here, I’m referring to them as bad or good from the perspective of a reader, not their moral or qualitative nature.

4 – Suffice it to say, I read a lot of books, including, when I was bored, a few textbooks on history and literature. One of the books addressed was The Lord of the Rings, and though I had a very poor understanding of what precisely that was at the time of reading the textbook, I did understand enough to know the big twist with Gandalf and the ending of the story (the ‘and they dropped the Ring in’ ending and nothing more) when I started reading.

5 – Read a review here; it’s a 9/10 book at least, demoted a point largely for not being The Lord of the Rings, with great villains.