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RE: Ghosts and Old Memories (A Pandemic Story) - Part 3/Finale
I'm grateful to you for taking the trouble to give me a call.
Now you have done it again - you've left us hanging, waiting to learn what the story of Alyssa is. Perhaps you could go back a bit, before she met the other women and build it up to when she meets them...or else, maybe something important/interesting happens a bit in their future and she tells them because of it.
Sounds like you've got dozens of branches to follow, maybe they'll converge on the main one later?
Thanks and I'll be waiting to start reading the main story.
Just wait...Alyssa's story is coming next. I'm actually seriously considering abandoning the traditional-style novel I was writing and providing my narrative through multiple short stories that all converge and diverge at different points. Some of them would be one-offs with no further connection, and I've actually written some of those narratives in the draft of my novel already. Others, like Alyssa and Eric's stories would weave in and out of each other's narratives throughout the course of the overall narrative. I realize that this is a structure that is commonly used in novels (look at George R.R. Martin), but I think I want to tell them in distinct chunks with other characters picking up some of the narrative threads at different points in the timeline.
I'm not sure what I think about that, but I'm going to explore that a little bit more!
I think that it does not matter how you align your stories; whether into one well-knit story or a converging of lives that impinge on those of your main characters.
Let me give you a crazy example, which should prove I have taken the risk and know what I am talking about, though I have no idea of how successful or not I have been.
In paperback book layout, my story is at about 25,000 pages and I have been writing it for 18 years. For all those years I have been devoted to it, to the point where I got carpal tunnel syndrome. Exercise helped, so I was able tocontinue writing (being in steemit might bring the problem back).
My characters live in an alternate reality from ours and they develop gifts. Cherine and Robert and their family are all linked to each other and thanks to that, they are able to link others, including alien species and as their main gift is empathy, the world is affected.
Robert learns how to 'jump' to alternate Earths and soon they are jumping to help other Roberts and Cherines love each other and open themselves to the same gifts.
I don't even know (I never counted) how many such families theyhelped.
The reason for my telling you of my book, is that if I wrote well, it works, if not, people will find the helping of alternates, again and again, very boring - but then, even without the alternate repetitions, it would have been boring.