Ever feel like your story needs an extra punch? There’s just not enough kick to it? It’s just not jumping off the page and attacking you in the face enough?
Well, I got – not a solution but a possible idea.
There’s this thing called character folding *raise your hand if you’ve heard of it*. It’s when you take two or more character and combine them into one character. So instead of there being a neighbor, a boss, and an ex wife, you just combine them to their ex wife who is also their boss who happens to live down the street.
Well that just made a LOT of things *in sing-song voice* “uncomfortable!”
Using character folding has been really helpful for me when a story is dragging. I also like to do another thing that is like a modified version of it, where instead of combining characters, I give characters more relationships.
Instead of my villain and MC 1 and MC 2 just being three separate individuals, I made MC 1 be an ex-lover of the villain and MC 2 be the sister of the villain. BOOM. Things just got way more intense.
Basically, if you can make the connection between characters closer (either by combining characters or adding types of relationships like family relation, love/marriage, or other kinds of acquaintance.), it will automatically add tension. Guaranteed subplots.
That is if your the type of person *me* who doesn’t have enough subplots.
If you have too many subplots then…maybe just forget everything I said.
Bernadette Benda 
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