When I was little my favorite toys were action figures; small or large, it didn’t matter. GI Joes, super heroes, or movie monsters, they were all good. But just owning them wasn’t enough; they needed to get busy. Back then I didn’t worry about sound plot mechanics, I was perfectly content having Dracula get into a a shoot out with GI Joe–who knew that soldiers had wooden bullets in their guns? These days I try and be a little more discriminating about my plot mechanics, but once I have my characters basically fleshed out, I want them to get busy too. That’s not to say that I don’t need to keep adding more layers to all of them, but given what we already know about them, I want to see what they can do–or not do, in the face of adversity.
I felt I had a natural avenue already set up to explore that by simply letting the royal siblings find out what’s really going on in their realm–and then having some fun drawing Begone and Ohrder in on their hijinks. The main goal being that I felt I needed to start building more intrigue and twists and turns into the plot and subplots, not just to keep the story interesting, but growing. One of the key things that I want to do–from the very beginning of the story, but more and more as the plot unfolds, is to make the readers unconsciously say to themselves, “I’ve got questions and I want answers.” Okay, enough yammering, let’s go see if any of that actually made it off the keyboard.
And…
Well, honestly, it looks like I ended up biting off more than I could chew in a single chapter. Cliffhangers are not a bad thing, but this isn’t truly a cliffhanger as much as it was the closest thing to a break point in this subplot that I’d have at my disposal for many more pages. Which brings up an interesting question. How long is too long for a chapter…why not just keep going? If there is an answer to that, I don’t know it, but with both the books I read and the stories I write, there seems to be a rhythm; nothing hard and fast, just a tempo that seems to keep most of the chapters approximately of the same length. Will I leave it as is? I don’t know yet. Maybe we’ll talk more about that after chapter seven.
Enough on that, next topic. Did I meet my goals? Short answer, I can work with what I just read…I do want to know what in the world the royals have dragged the kid–and themselves, into, and I liked the whole magic mirror piece–I think that rates a “cool factor” nod, and I felt that getting a peek into Begone’s growing awareness of the strange world he lives in was good too. So, bottom line, I don’t think this chapter needs a full rewrite…as long as it doesn’t need to be morphed to include the events of the next chapter.
May the Lord bless your day,
Mike
Leave a Reply