It apparently isn’t enough to keep up with all the drama the characters in my new story are creating for themselves. Now I am muddying the waters by interweaving their dramas and making each of them instruments in each other’s dilemma. Insanity. I don’t know why the writing is taking me in that direction, but it is; so I now have to master the road.
If I can pull off the twists, turns and reveals, the story will be much stronger and far more suspenseful. But that’s the thing: ‘IF’. Once more, I’ve challenged myself with more than I currently know how to do. First, I have to reacquaint myself with dramatic irony, dilemma and subtext. Then I have to take it to the next level. Unfortunately, I don’t yet know where ‘the next level’ is.
The explicit effort to manage dilemma is new to me. Of course, it is the source of dramatic conflict, but there are several types of dilemma I can exploit and I need to deeply understand what they are and which applies for each character’s situation.
Another big thing is that for me to understand how to weave the stories together, I need to have a complete narrative of the story from each of the main characters’ points of view.
Yippee.
From one first draft narrative to four.
Or six.
Or kill me now…
