Minor Annoyances
Dropped stitches.
Gnats.
Life is full of teeny tiny annoyances that seem trivial at the time, but that can add up to cause big problems.
Fiction needs to be, too.
In the first couple of drafts of SS, I put in minor annoyances in the form of things, but not many of them. Probably not enough. And I certainly didn’t do enough with the minor annoyances in the form of antagonists.
I have minor bad-guys in there, sure. But I’m not sure that they’re big enough. I’m not sure that, by the end of the novel, the minor antagonists would even be remembered at all, much less as definite bad guys. There is no “oh, so that’s who the random guy in the bar was!” There is nothing to identify these minor antagonists as anything other than gnats.
Now, don’t get me wrong. There will be - and should be - some gnats in fiction. But they need to be chosen for that purpose, not become gnats because the writer neglected to make them wasps. This writer has been neglecting the minor bad guys in the hopes that she doesn’t need to hit her audience over the head with the connections. But I think that I haven’t been fair to my readers - they’re not dumb, but neither are they in my head. They need a few hints in order to decipher the clues. These minor bad guys need to get their sting back.
