My current project is rewriting/revising my fantasy-comedy (animation-optional). It has undergone numerous drafts, along with multiple revisions and variations on both the primary storyline and several subplots.

There have been a handful of the latter which have been particular tricky to figure out the best approach. Something just wasn’t clicking, so I took my usual approach to finding a solution and stepped away from my laptop, put on my running shoes, and hit the road.

While my feet pounded the pavement, the next hour and seven minutes heavily involved coming up with possible alternatives to how the story reads now. A few possibilities presented themselves, but nothing to make me stop short and proclaim “That’s it!”

So I took another usual approach, that of taking a step back for a more of a “big picture”.

Silly as it sounds, I’d forgotten that one of those earlier drafts had some decent contest success (not that that’s my goal), so I dug up that one to give it a read.

A large percentage of that script remains in the most recent one, but especially close attention was paid to “what drives your protagonist”. More than a few readers had similar things to say about that. My hope is that fleshing that out a bit more will have the desired effect and reinforce the whole story.

There are a few other subplots that also need work, but this was one of the big ones.

This kind of approach will be the strategy for this latest draft. The last thing I want to do is over-complicate things, and I’m fairly confident that doing this will help keep things simple.