Some Notes on Romantic Subplot

I don't know how much I have to say about writing. By which I mean most of what I have to say seems trivial, obvious, simple. And better said by actually writing than writing about it.

Romantic Subplot added to both jars

Hence Romantic Subplot, my interactive essay on one way I keep hold of romantic subplots. How does the romantic subplot develop in this scene? Two characters want to kiss. I do not let them kiss.

Simple. Obvious. Trivial.

So simple and obvious it looks like a joke. And it is, it's the "author is someone who creates a guy and then tortures them" joke. Which is funny because it's true. It's funny because it's serious.

It's funny because it's a workable writing strategy.

I thought I'd write something up about it and made some notes. Some light-hearted, some serious, some tangents that went a long way out from anywhere sensible. I thought maybe I'd write it up as an essay, or a twitter (X) thread, or some other social media site. (Find me on tumblr, cohost, even instagram (very bad for essays)).

It wasn't obvious how to structure it. What to cut. The tone it was to take. Should I riff on romance subplots in films? Should I explain clearly what I mean. Should I just mess about, in the same way that this subplot structure messes with the characters, never giving them satisfaction.

Might help navigate? Might not.

Twine is an interactive storytelling tool for making hyperlinked documents. This allows the reader to click on highlighted words to take them to another page. If I put every thought into Twine as a separate page I could create an essay where people could move through the ideas as they wished, finding footnotes and asides, or travelling straight through.

I didn't do this. There's no throughline with side-jaunts. This is no longer a linear narrative. I had intended that it all go downhill towards the end, but in the final revision I discovered I'd created a loop. Never mind though, I had abandoned this design plan as well.

To be clear, you can't follow the links and see everything in one go. You have to start again, or reverse course and pick another route. Some are nodes that lots of links go to. Some only have one way to get to them. I would say that's not an indication of their importance or interest, but I guess the structure of the essay disagrees with me.

For an interactive essay about creating a simple guideline and sticking to it, I really didn't follow my own advice.