How do I keep from getting ahead of myself?

[meretia]

I have a novel I've been working on for a little while. It's sort of complicated. Trying to explain it I feel a little bit like I'm doing one of those slight-of-hand tricks where they walk you through it nice and slow and then go "aha! But where did the coin go?"

Okay, so. The main question the protagonist is trying to find in the story is "what happened to Secondary Character A?" The basic premise is that there’s a fantasy world where characters live who are the embodiment of archetypes and tropes--the Hero, the Pair of Creepy Villains, etc.--alongside the real one. My main character, Fox, owns a New Age bookstore and is a psychic. She gets pulled into the other world's political shenanigans when the Warrior Woman enlists Fox to find out what's become of her gentleman friend, the Knight in Shining Armor. Last place anyone saw him was coming out of Fox's store and she read the cards for him, so she must know something (which, of course, is all news to her).

My problem comes with the first chapter I wrote. I'd just meant it to be a good hook into the story, but it sort of vaguely answers the question, though that isn't obvious at the time. Where did he go? He was kidnapped by the Villain and the Turncoat. Their motivation is a lot more complicated than it first seems--it looks like a simple ransom at first, but they're working for somebody else, who is attempting to rearrange the political power structure in the trope world--and I feel like I ought to keep writing that subplot more than I am.

As the story sits, the first chapter is the White Knight going to meet with some folks who turn out to have bad things planned for him, though it isn't clear in that chapter what they intend or why he's there. It isn't until chapter three or four that the Warrior Woman brings Fox to her offices and says pretty much "look, my boy's missing and you're going to find him." There's a lot more going on than they know about--the Knight was trying to get away from his present situation and really, really bet on the wrong horse when he tried to get someone to help him leave. He made a deal with the Villain (I don't even know what yet) and didn't find out until it was too late that he'd been double-crossed. After the first chapter, I don't go back to that subplot until somewhere near the middle of the story, where the Knight has somehow escaped and knows that pretty much everyone is in a lot of trouble. I don't want to let the plot out too early, because there's no real suspense if the reader sees everything that's happening right from the beginning, is there? But on the other hand it seems like it would be sort of frustrating/annoying/disappointing for the reader to jump right from "they got him" to "oh no, he's loose, that's no problem now!"

I'd been playing with the structure of the story such that major revelations come in the chapter after the main characters figure out the most likely answer. For example, the Knight isn't the only trope to disappear. Fox finds this out when she and her companion go looking for the Wise Woman for advice only to find that she's gone too. Then in the next chapter, it's back to the Knight wherever he's being held and the same gang who grabbed him are also holding the Wise Woman for whatever reason. I'm just not sure that if I keep that up, that "oh, that's not good. What happened?" "This happened!" structure for the whole story, that it would work well. I can sort of see where it might fall into the "protagonist is always right" trap and be annoying. And while I'm alternating storylines between chapters, I'm not quite sure how long is too long to spend with the subplot. I think every other chapter would be too often and would be jarring, but I think more than two or three in the main story before checking in on the subplot would be spreading it too thin.

I'm not sure. Does it sound like it ought to work as is, or should I change it somehow? How do you keep from giving away too much of your stories too soon?

[edited to include specifics of the story]

Comments

[bliumchik]

Oh, I see. Well in my opinion it depends on how well/naturally you do the actual writing of it, but you're right that doing it with every chapter might be too neat. It's really down to your judgement though - write it whichever way you feel works and then after you're done and it's with beta readers, let them know that that is one effect you want thoughts on.