Troublesome Drafts

I’ve got about 30,000 words into a draft of a book and I’ve got a nasty feeling I’ve made things way too complicated. The book I finished up last year had three main characters and two major secondaries. The one I’m working on now has… more than that. Let me just count:

A protagonist

A primary antagonist

A Lancer

Two slippery eels

One ordinary Jane

One moral distortor

That’s seven characters compared with five, which doesn’t seem like much, but they all have different motivations to juggle, and most of them are working against the protagonist. It’s possible that it’s not actually too complicated, but my protagonist needs someone to trust who she can be safe with.

And I actually have a character for that, interesting… I’ll think some more about this.

Welcome to ‘Thinking Aloud with Michael Coolwood’.

I do this a decent amount. I have a problem and can’t see a way through it until I set it out and go ‘Ooooh maybe that’s what’s going wrong…’