When is the Right Time to Introduce Side Stories and New Ideas?

Paraphrasing from last week's newsletter, if the protagonist's love interest is dangling precariously from a cliff face, it's probably not a great time for them to go and check if they left the oven on.

In other words, if the main story is teetering on the edge of a pivotal, time-sensitive event, then the characters involved shouldn't be concerning themselves with anything else. One thing that we left out of the newsletter was that there is a caveat to this: unless they have a very good reason.

Let's say a friend of the main cast has been taken hostage. Given the danger they're in, any non-essential action the group takes that doesn't in some way further the cause of rescuing said friend is going to feel very strange. At best, the reader will question their priorities, and at worst, they'll be unable to suspend their disbelief and dismiss the plot as unrealistic.

That brings us to the need for a reason. The other threads of the story don't need to grind to a complete halt in the face of a major crisis, but if you're going to further them before it's resolved, you need to answer one (or both) of these questions:

• what makes this more important than everything else that's going on, and/or
• how does everything else that's going on affect it?

Expanding on the hostage example, imagine that the triumphant rescue is still a long ways off, and there's a budding romance you want to bloom in the interim. A casual, stress-free date at a local café might further the relationship, but it would fail to answer one of the questions above. Their couples' milkshake certainly wouldn't feel more important than saving their friend, and their lack of regard would come across as callous and insensitive.

Unless the kidnapper's condition for releasing the hostage was that those two fall in love, it would be hard to argue that the date was a higher priority than the rescue mission. Answering the second question however is actually fairly simple.

If there's any shred of decency in the pair, they're probably going to express a little guilt about falling for each other while their friend feels the water level in the grain silo rise above their waist. They might only have been at the café because they'd been awake for three days straight following every lead, and were going to collapse from exhaustion unless they took a break. Hell, maybe they're there following one of those leads, and the milkshake started out as part of their cover.

The bottom line is that your readers are situationally aware, and expect situational awareness from your characters too. As long as your detour isn't completely frivolous and doesn't run counter to their primary goal, if your character(s) simply acknowledge that, hey, maybe this isn't the best time for this, then you can probably get away with it.