The Plot Thickens…?

I’m stuffing the rewrite of Revealed back into a “drawer” again. I want to wait until a couple people have read it and commented more thoroughly on it before tearing it apart again and just sitting here second-guessing myself. I still don’t have a lot of ideas on how I’m going to fix the hero’s arc, but instead of beating my head against that wall, I decided to do something proactive.

I’m going back to the previous WIP where the pesky fellow was only a secondary character. I’ve been taking my spreadsheet that I based on the diagrams in Dunne’s Emotional Structure and Vogler’s Writer’s Journey. I’ve added a lot of notes to it from various other sources as well, and I hope I have something I can work with to guide my thinking into a workable and interesting story.

The main problem is that I have 25k words written in this WIP already. Trying to determine if the already written scenes need to stay or just move is giving me a headache. I suspect I’m also having similar issues with the GMC of the characters not being defined well enough to propel the plot along in a meaningful fashion.

I’ve also been chasing down a lot of rabbit trails lately. I’ve found a lot of interest in the world of screenwriting. Setups and payoffs, ideas about laying out things to fix in the characters life to make the story pay off, and generally more information to take up space in my brain. I hope they’re worth it as I have been trying to think about how these little tidbits relate to the stories I’m trying to tell.

This new/old WIP has an external conflict that the H/h should be working to resolve, but it’s not gelling very well with the emotional story arcs that they also need to follow. His lack of responsibility and her overdeveloped sense of protecting her brother are nice opposites. He’s being forced to be respectable and she only sees the worst in his little vices (which compared to the examples that her father and brother have provided her of wastrels are rather pathetic).

So far, I think I have the opening worked out for both the hero and the heroine and the middle worked out for the hero. Her middle is a bit more muddled in my head. And about all I know of the ending for either of them is that the external threat is defeated and they have their Happily Ever After.

I also need to write up reviews for two books I managed to finish recently. I’ll try to get those done sometime here in the near future.