Don't Pull on That Thread!!! Unless You Have To
by Tom Tripp
Oy. I did it. I pulled on the thread that you're not supposed to pull. It seems there's a good reason not to pull on the thread. Now I have to fix it. I'll come back to this in a minute.
Um, yeah, I pulled on the purple thread. Photo - Christopher J. Flynn, Wikimedia Commons
I've had a lot of "real" work lately, so the novel has been sitting quietly in the back of my head while I was distracted with stuff that brings income in NOW. But as we all know, it never sits there truly quietly. It wiggles around, moves up and down and generally vies for attention. If you're like me, it usually gets that attention, at least from my subconscious if not the conscious part of my brain.
Something about the storytelling in this novel has been bothering me but I wasn't able to put my finger on it. The other day, while talking to a friend about her novel, I realized that my problem was with the building of suspense in my own story. I had revealed too much about the antagonist(s) early on and in doing so had robbed myself (and my future potential readers) of a chance to learn more slowly and deliberately, about who they were and what their motivation was.
So when I finally got a chance to sit down at my laptop I pulled on that particular thread in the literary tapestry I've been weaving. What a mess. It ain't so much a tapestry anymore. Now I've got to stretch the damned thing out again and re-weave this thread more cleverly and with more subtlety.
I guess there are as many plot models as there are thriller/mystery writers, and I don't think it's necessarily bad to write a story the way I had originally, but in this case it robbed the overall effort of some naturally building tension and I needed to fix it. I wanted to have the plot tension build as deliberately as the tension in my character development. It seems a more natural fit in this story.
I'm wondering if any of you have "pulled that thread" like I did? What happened when you did?
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