Girls do that

Don't know how many attempts it took to get a draft scene where my protagonist first meets the "dragon" of the story. There were many. Over the course of at least a week.

That's TVTropes talk again. The "dragon" archetype is a character who is the active antagonist for most of the story, but isn't the actual villain-in-chief.

Mine is sort of doing a dual role. His actual goal is to secure a potsherd, which as far as anyone else knows could probably be achieved with enough cash. He is approaching it, however, as if he is the bad guy in a cliché adventure; he's enjoying playing Belloq and thus dragging my protagonist reluctantly into playing Indiana Jones.

So it took over a week and a heck of a lot of attempts to finally get a draft of that scene. This is one of those places where plot and theme overtake incident.

I think my last big writing was mostly incident. There was a plot, but it wasn't terribly well integrated into a thematic whole. The old saw is, "'The King dies' is Incident. 'The King dies and the Queen dies of grief' is Story." Or "Plot," depending on where you are getting the quote from.

And, yes, today's title is taken from some ludicrous events within the Star Wars canon. Apparently Padme is not the only character to mysteriously die of "grief." YouTube commenter Jenny Nicholson, dryly, "Girls do that in this galaxy."

Anyhow, yeah. It gives me a little more sympathy for the crazy changes screenwriters make to what you would think was already perfectly useable source material. It is easy to criticize when a story has unrealistic elements -- things that wouldn't work like that in the real world, things that are far too convenient for the characters or for the plot, etc. But the physical setting and action is really visible iceberg stuff. To make a Story instead of a string of Incidents you've got all of these stuff of character development and conflicts and resolutions and statements of theme and emotional resonances and....

There are always external choices. The Hays Code dictated that the bad guys always lost in the end. Street and Smith had a house style for dialog. There's a wonderful bit in the musical The Drowsy Chaperone. There's a cute little scene that exists mostly to do a spit-take gag over and over. After it is concluded the Man in the Chair comes out to mop the stage. As he does so he comments that the only reason the bit was in the show was the set crew needed time to change the sets. He does this explanation, mind you, in front of the main rag....giving the set crew needed time to change the set.

And, yeah, it is incredibly difficult to make it all work. Much as we hate it, in the end the story is god and if you need to put seven bullets into a six-shooter to make the plot happen, then so be it.

So, yeah. There are a bunch of ways the scene could have been set up, or could have resolved. There are a bunch of ways in which how it actually unfolds isn't strictly realistic. But it is the scene I need to move the plot forward in the right directions.