By Patrick Davy

When your protagonists have too many choices, this should open up the possibilities for you to create subplots. If you are like me, you probably welcome the opportunity to create subplots since they allow for more complex and longer stories.

I am not advocating that it is better to have a three hundred-page novel instead of one with only a hundred pages. Whether a story is long or short, it must cause readers to want to turn the pages to find out more.

If you do not want to go the subplot route, look ahead in your main plot to see which of your protagonist’s present choices will provide the best payoff. This should be easy to do if you had outlined your story before you started writing it. In other words, you should foreshadow – a popular fiction element used by many writers.

If foreshadowing does not work for you, have your protagonists make choices that give the most opportunities to create suspense – another fiction element. You create suspense by prolonging the resolutions of your protagonist’s conflicts or problems.