You may not know it but a lot of writers like to set challenges for themselves. Can I write a novel or short story strictly following the fairy tale format? Let me see if I can write an unreliable narrator. I’m going to tackle first person (much harder then you think). So the writing challenge I set for myself with the space opera was having only two view point characters — my hero and heroine, and alternating scenes between them.
So I’m closing in on 60,000 words and it’s been working. Where I’m seeing the problem coming is in the later books where they are going to be separated by vast distances. I’m beginning to think that at that point I will need two more view point characters to interact with hero and heroine in their disparate locations.
I’ve also found that I know a lot more about my male character and what motivates him then I do about the woman. As I write her and dig deeper into her really screwed up family situation she’s coming more and more into focus, but it’s sometimes harder to write about a person who has great privilege. They have challenges to overcome, but they are less obvious than the poor kid from the wrong side of the tracks. Basically they are “first world problems”, and those are harder to make dramatic and interesting.
