Understanding the Impact of Microcosm and Macrocosm in Story
How do we tell and live great stories that people will care about and remember?
Whether you are currently writing a fantasy novel or a history of the Great Pandemic, how you pay attention to the interweaving of plot and character will determine the extent to which your story will resonate with others. Every action, every choice affects another character and impedes or propels the success of the story. Memorable and enduring stories connect the microcosm to the macrocosm and back again.
Microcosm
When a great tragedy occurs, writing about its smallest elements helps connect people emotionally. Thinking in terms of 600,000 deaths worldwide due to COVID-19—or whatever number we have reached when you read this post—invites an abstract, clinical response: we consider the expanse of the tragedy yet divorce ourselves from the humanity of the moment.
Instead, we communicate the immensity of tragedy best when we portray not just an individual doctor who died treating countless others, but her young daughter’s blanket lying on the mother’s empty side of the bed, where the girl crawls in each night to cuddle with her dad and a memory. That small blanket creates meaning out of a number. Every tragedy has countless microcosms, pain points that scale as human-sized moments that can burrow into our hearts.
But staying zoomed in to a near-sighted vision of tragedy distorts our comprehension of the story. Our microcosm of self has meaning only in the context of others. I am not my own mini, self-contained universe. A character has purpose only in terms of her relationship to the grander story and the others within it.
Macrocosm
Think about the Tom Hank’s film Cast Away. For the majority of the movie, we have only Hank’s character, Chuck Noland, in sight. Crashed on a deserted island, he endures years of hardship to survive. The bulk of the movie is his microcosm.
But we only care about Chuck Noland because of his macrocosm, the story points that connect him to others and to a grand narrative about our need for human relationship. We want Noland to get back to his fiancée, his friend, his job. We want him to survive because his life has a bigger purpose than him being alive all by himself.
If staying alive and protecting self were our greatest values, we would boo rather than cheer when he risks death vaulting the reef to leave the island. If the microcosm of one were enough, we would not care about Wilson, the volleyball-turned-companion Noland has created. But our stomachs lurch as we watch Wilson slip away during a storm.
In a story of one, with no grand metanarrative, no one matters. No choice matters. No pain matters. No sacrifice matters. If Noland wants to live forever on the island, what’s it to us? If he wants to leave, why do we care? Without the larger context of his story, we don’t even know his name.
The Story of the Forest and the Tree
In A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, Donald Miller reminds us that the microcosm of self means little without knowing its connection to the macrocosm of the story we inhabit. Having written a widely successful memoir (Blue Like Jazz) but subsequently and repeatedly rejected by publishers, Miller’s day-to-day collapses on itself until two filmmakers propose he rewrite his memoir into a movie. With their tutelage, he begins to see beyond himself to how he as a character fits in a larger, grander narrative.
As he learns, he steadily develops a better of perspective of his own value within that story—that is, until he meets up with a moment of his greatest suffering. He and his fiancée break up just before their wedding. For months, he cannot pull his eyes away from his own pain, his own microcosm of tragedy. He creates a false narrative of himself from a myopic view of the lint in his own navel.
But then he reads the work of Dr. Victor Frankl, a psychologist interred in Nazi concentration camps. Frankl lost family and was himself subjected to the cruel abuse in the camps. The Nazis wanted their prisoners to lose hope and die of despair. They forbade inmates from encouraging one another. But Frankl ignored their commands and whispered in the ears of those who had lost the will to live.
Miller writes:
The essence of his whispers were that life, even amid the absurdity of human suffering, still had meaning. Suffering, as absurd as it seemed, pointed to a greater story in which, if one would only construe himself as a character within, he could find fulfillment in his tragic role, knowing the plot was headed toward redemption. ...
… Pain then, if one could have faith in something greater than himself, might be a path to experiencing a meaning beyond the false gratification of personal comfort. (195–196)
So even as Miller found himself despairing his own life, misjudging its value, and hearing that repeating refrain, “No one will ever love you,” he realized that
Victor Frankl whispered in my ear all the same. He said to me I was a tree in a story about a forest, and that it was arrogant of me to believe any differently. And he told me the story of the forest is better than the story of the tree. (198)
Miller’s story wasn’t just about him. He found comfort there.
Pain Has Meaning in the Larger Story
My pain, my death, and even my choices have no meaningful consequence if they are only about me. The pandemic doctor mentioned above was also a tree in a forest. If she didn’t do her job, the whole forest would grow sick and die. But if she considered only her story as a tree, she would have been unable or unwilling to play her vital role in the story of the forest. She would have avoided her own death at all costs.
No sacrifice ever makes sense when considered in the microcosm. But the macrocosm lends purpose and dignity even to loss. Our pain has meaning because there is a larger story.
What stories are you writing, both on paper and in the world? Are you connecting the macrocosm to the microcosm and back to the macrocosm again? How do your characters’ internal and external motives connect to the story world goal?
Whisper in their ear, “It’s not about you alone.”