A Writer's Device: Scale factors.

Whether it is in your notes or in your manuscript, you'd better have a clear idea of how "big" and how "usual" your fictional constructs (non-character) in the story will be. One of the most glaring tells of the absurd is when the Two Guys and Their Faithful Dog defeats the thousand or so evil barbarians assaulting the village... unless you're talking about the Canadian Army's expeditionary capability these days. Those two guys might have it covered, if they didn't run out of ammo. (( grin ))

More to the point, you need to be honest with yourself as to how unlikely or out of scale something is. Are you writing about the 5 people who are the exception to the 10,000 employee corporation they work for? Are they just another drone in the local School District office until that fateful day came for them? Does Imperial Terra clone a million such space marines to replace losses every year? I think you get the point.

Here's a part of the scale factor notes in the Dear Diary for the Main Character in Remember When:

"There was also a vast scramble of other resources and assets available to the people organizing The Project. Scattered through the U.S Government were, and are, an alphabet soup of other agencies with supposedly limited areas of interest in the clandestine sides of Law Enforcement, Diplomacy, and things Scientific. I'm not sure if the U.S. Postal Inspectors had a covert infiltration section, but let's just say I wouldn't have been surprised. I do know we weren't given the opportunity we were because we had an uncanny ability to investigate mail fraud. The Project looked for other, more difficult-to-assess, things.

"To pause a moment for perspective, if you please: The entire U.S. Special Operations community, uniformed, was a very small number of people (in the years 1978-1980) compared to the post-2000-era military. Then, across all services, the total was roughly 5,000 personnel assigned. There were a few hundred non-uniformed, and some bare handfuls of non-military-or-intelligence-agency pools of field-worthy espionage assets. The numbers in more recent times are more like 50,000 and 10,000, although drawn from a much smaller military and intelligence structure overall. Adding a capacity of a hundred or so (intended; we never got that many as far as I know) uniquely suited personnel was a big deal in the late '70s; Doing so now is round off error."

Okay then... pretty clear that The Project is a pretty small group of bad asses, who could get wiped off the face of history by one bad operation and a few thousand modestly competent enemies... or one line of red ink through their place in the "black budget".

As the author, I'd better be careful with them, right? At least now I know the risks, and I hope this example helps you know yours. Comments are open for more banter about this.