Late news...
Mar. 11th, 2006 02:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
khiemtranHaving just decided that I can't make the story more engaging and still keep the tone of the original, I've just seen a way that I might be able to it.
It involves breaking the early events up and inserting them as flashback into a different story arc in the new opening. I've tried this before and it's actually a fairly logical way to cover them - the early events that I'm concerned about all happen at intervals, sometimes years apart, and they don't all naturally flow from one to another. With a framing arc, I can have the viewpoint walking through a city looking for a particular house and having memories triggered by different things along the way.
The problem with my earlier attempt at this was in making the framing arc work as a story on its own. To maintain the mood and the tone I want, I need to keep one of the story arcs found in the flashbacks to the fore and to downplay another. I've decided that one way I can do this is by deliberately spoilering a cliffhanger in the arc I'm trying to downplay. The character is expecting to meet a childhood friend in the house and, when he gets there, he learns that she is gone. If this happens at the end of the arc, it makes it seem as if the section is all about the search for that friend. If it happens in the middle and the story rolls on past it, then it seems like an anticlimax. If it happens at the start, however, I just might be able to make things work.
It involves breaking the early events up and inserting them as flashback into a different story arc in the new opening. I've tried this before and it's actually a fairly logical way to cover them - the early events that I'm concerned about all happen at intervals, sometimes years apart, and they don't all naturally flow from one to another. With a framing arc, I can have the viewpoint walking through a city looking for a particular house and having memories triggered by different things along the way.
The problem with my earlier attempt at this was in making the framing arc work as a story on its own. To maintain the mood and the tone I want, I need to keep one of the story arcs found in the flashbacks to the fore and to downplay another. I've decided that one way I can do this is by deliberately spoilering a cliffhanger in the arc I'm trying to downplay. The character is expecting to meet a childhood friend in the house and, when he gets there, he learns that she is gone. If this happens at the end of the arc, it makes it seem as if the section is all about the search for that friend. If it happens in the middle and the story rolls on past it, then it seems like an anticlimax. If it happens at the start, however, I just might be able to make things work.
