@awnlee jawking
I take it you're writing on the fly and you don't have the story mapped out through to its conclusion.
Is it your intention to tag the story as 'Romantic'? If so, the couple should probably stick together.
I am writing it on the fly. That's my writing style overall. I can't plan too far ahead or else I just spend all day planning and planning and then I get lost in trying to figure out how to connect the dots. It's a style that definitely has its pros and cons, but what style doesn't. I DO have some bigger plot points in mind and and I have some clue as to where I want them to be within the continuity of the story, but even those ideas are not completely set in stone.
As for the tagging of the story, I haven't entirely worked out all the tags yet. I have a certain point I want to get to before I start releasing the chapters on SOL. When I reach that point I'm going to make the decisions on tags. The only tag I know for certain would be the Coming of Age genre tag. As I'm writing this the romantic tag will probably be there. What was throwing me off was the fact that the relationship he is in wasn't meant to be long term. The genre is Coming of Age so you can't throw the star couple together too early right? lol. The girlfriend was meant to be a secondary character support character, but I've really enjoyed writing her and she's kind of grown on me.
From the limited information you've given, I'm imagining that the story so far focuses on the couple. If they now break up and go different directions, does that dump all the emotional investment that had been built so far?
Yeah I didn't give a lot of information because I plan to hopefully start getting some chapters released here soon and don't want to spoil things too much, but thankfully I did find a happy medium with the particular scene. Thankfully the focus of the story isn't on that couple in particular. As I said above, the girlfriend in question really started out as a supporting role character. The relationship hasn't had so much emotional development that it's a huge major shake up, but there has been enough where it was a difficult scene to think about writing.
I do like your thought about the story being tight and the strands metaphor. That's what I'm going for here. I'm sticking strictly to a first person POV. I don't plan on having any sort of chapters were there is a "guest narrator" or anything like that. Nothing against that type of writing, but I want to have the mystery of not knowing fully what other characters are thinking or feeling. It brings in all levels of excitement and surprise when things unfold later on in the story. I think writing it like that helps keep a lot of those strands together. That way you don't have too much going on all at once.