Okay, here’s my dilemma. (Which I’ll figure out by May 1 but what the hey). In my first draft, my heroine finds out her nemesis is her half-sister in a climactic reveal. In my revision, those two characters start looking the same. The problem is that it started to turn into a Tale of Two Cities thing. So I decided to make them identical twins. Which introduces these dilemmas:
o How were twins brought up on the opposite side of the track? Separated at birth, but how? Why?
o I hate, hate, HATE the Evil Twin Meme. The point is not for one to defeat the other, but for them to unite to fight the real bad guys. How do I avoid making this completely trite?
o How do I reveal the relationship? My MC has no idea she has a sister. Her nemesis knows the truth but doesn’t want to admit it unless it serves her purposes. She actually wants to step into the MC’s life, to have everything the MC has.
o How do I make it so that people don’t immediately recognize them as twins…but sometimes mistake the two?—Iapetus999
Wow, that’s a lot of questions. I’ll address the first one now and the rest in separate posts later.
The climax of your novel must bring together in its main elements the threads of your entire story. If you want one of those threads to be the separation of the twins at birth, that has to be one of the elements that’s going to blow this climax sky-high.
In what way is that subplot about the twins a distinct train chug-chugging along its own track almost-but-not-quite parallel to your main plotline throughout your story, on its way to inevitable collision with that main plotline? In what way is that subplot in which the twins are first separated and then, alarmingly, reunited absolutely essential to that collision? In what way is that separation part of the initial fuel that kicks this main plotline into gear, way, way back in the Dark Ages where this story begins?
You see why I keep telling you guys professional, working novelists work from plot outlines? This is walking the tightrope without a net.