After all this work I’d been putting into the planning of my new story, there were still some aspects that still needed some work. Two of the major areas that still remained involved my main character and the plot.
Using the six essential questions had really shaped out a lot of the story, and I felt I understood the philosophy of my main character and where they fit into it. He was a hired hand, for essentially any job that paid well enough, but never accumulated much wealth. He would take on tougher and tougher jobs that paid higher and higher, just so he could treat himself to a taste of the good life. It led him to take on dangerous jobs, including going after wanted men, because pursuing this line of work and getting the payoffs was better than putting in the honest work where you made just enough to survive but never actually enjoyed living.
What I was having a small challenge with was having this philosophy come out in the best way during the story, in a way that had the most impact on the story. I felt the cast of characters, even down to tertiary ones were leaving their mark on the events that were taking place, but that my main character, while not being a passenger, he was definitely capitalizing on situations where he could, but he wasn’t having as big of an impact on the story, at least as it was being framed in the outlining process, it was more just moves happening around him and to him that he had to react to and use to his advantage.
The other aspect was the plot itself. I felt I had reached a point where I knew what all of the big moments were going to be in the script, it was how these story beats were connecting that I felt wasn’t coming together as well as it could. Most of the time, the situations and predicaments I was putting the main character in were temporarily being resolved just by writing a scene in which he escaped.
I was exploring these bridge scenes deeper and deeper as I was outlining, only as I was doing so, I found I was just filling out the scenes with more and more detail. It wasn’t really what I was setting out to achieve though.
I was just looking for that last little bit of the story. It’s that last little bit that really brings the story together.