by How to Tell A Story- The Secrets of Writing Captivating Tale (mobi)
To emphasize what I said before: A subplot is not just a bunch of stuff that happens to a character during a slow part of the main narrative. It has a connection with the main narrative, in the same way that harmony enriches and embellishes the lyrical line.
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PLOT AND SUBPLOT
Plot and subplot have a relationship: They come closer, they move apart, but they're never unaware of each other.
In Gary's Silhouette romance, Share the Dream, the main plot is, of course, the romance.
In the subplot, the protagonist, Carol, wants to spend more time and get closer to her sister, Bonnie.
So the sisters decide to go on vacation together. Not surprisingly (as this is a romance), Carol meets a fellow. When that happens, her success level goes up in the main plot because she moves closer to finding Mr. Wonderful. However, it moves down in the subplot, because she starts to neglect her sister in favor of Mr. Wonderful. When Mr. W appears to be married, Carol's potential success at achieving her goals in the main plot plummet, but now she can play Scrabble with her sister, so her success rate at achieving her goal in the subplot goes up.
It turns out it was all a misunderstanding over Mr. W being married, and he invites Carol to dinner. Now her success rate in the main plot is rising, but, uh-oh, she has to cancel a date with her sister to meet Mr. W, and her success rate in the subplot takes a nosedive as a result.
Of course, in writing, nothing is ever that pat, but I hope you get the idea that plot and subplot(s) interweave. They "braid," if you like.
Subplot as an Echo of the Main Plot
Gary and Gail wrote a sequel to Good If It Goes called David and Max. The book is about David, a twelve-year-old Jewish boy, who helps his grandfather search for an old friend from a Nazi concentration camp. In the process, David learns about the persecution of the Jews in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, the Holocaust and the terrible things that happened to his people.
It is, largely, a book about persecution. In other words, that's its theme.
But, there's a subplot that makes the book more playful, and more specifically designed for the young adult market it was written for. David likes to play basketball, but he's very short, and the other kids won't let him play. In effect, he is persecuted for being short. It's not a terrible thing. They're not vicious to him, but the theme of persecution is played out and developed in a more directly emotional way for David. It is something that directly affects him, and gives both him and the reader an inkling of what it must have felt like to live in his grandfather's shoes all those years ago, and, more importantly, it also helps readers grasp the awful enormity of what happened.
The connecting idea here, of course, is persecution and variations on that theme. In the main plot, there is the most wicked kind of persecution, based on bigotry, and in the subplot, the element is present in a more benign form: persecution of the short.
Subplot as Contradiction of the Main Plot
A subplot can also run counter to an idea or statement in the plot. Do you remember the movie King Kong? A giant ape is captured and taken from his island home to New York City. He gets free and sets about roaring and ripping apart buildings in Manhattan.
Do you also recall how gentle and sweet he is with Fay Wray's character, the girl he falls in love with? That's a deliberately contradictory subplot that gives you a clue as to who the real villains are in the main plot, and it's a nice counterpoint harmony to the main story line's melody. Again, it's strength is that it emphasizes an important emotional element of the main story and explores a quality of the main character that plays into the story, by giving us a better understanding of who the ape really is.
The subplot can also be an internal element. Say a man is trying to conquer a mountain. That drama will be played out in an external, physical, and visual way.
But the subplot could well involve an internal, character-driven element, such as his efforts to conquer his fear or guilt, a staple motivation for a number of central characters in plays and stories from Shakespeare's Macbeth to Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.
Ideally, even though an internally driven plot, it should, as much as possible, be dramatized in an external way, eventually preparing readers for the stakes and prizes that await the hero's attempted conquest of the mountain.
A AND B STORIES
If you watch situation comedies, you'll notice that they always seem to have an A story (or main story) and a B story (or subplot).
When the scripts are well written, there will always be a connection between the two stories. In the A story, maybe young woman character number one is trying to get rid of a persistent suitor. This will be played with some humor and poignancy. In the B story, meanwhile, male friend number two is being hounded by telemarketers, and not being the confrontational type, he hits on an elaborate lie to explain why he doesn't want ten years' supply of "almost free" vitamin pills for "only" $59 95 per month for the next five years.
Two seemingly unconnected stories. But both are linked by theme. The theme, of course, deals with the way we reject people or, perhaps even more specifically, the white lies we tell in an attempt to avoid hurting someone's feelings and all the trouble such action can get us into.
Having figured out the theme, it is relatively simple to come up with a subplot to reflect the variations of that theme. So the subplot is clearly not chosen at random, nor does it involve an element in the character's life disconnected from the main story.
A subplot can also be a continuing dream, a persistent memory, a lingering romance, a major ambition, a pressing project, anything, in fact, that somehow resonates with or illuminates the main narrative, throwing a new light on it.
WHAT'S PLOT AND WHAT'S NOT?
A plot is not everything that happens in your character's life from the moment the story begins until the point when it ends. Readers have no interest in when he eats his meals, what he eats, how he eats, when he goes to the bathroom, how many times, which hand he uses to wave good-bye to his family, etc. All these things may happen, but they are not relevant to your story. You must be selective in choosing the appropriate detail. This may sound easy and ridiculous put like this, but inexperienced writers attempting to reconstruct real events, be they for a historical book, a true crime account or some other genre, are faced with a very real version of this problem all the time. How do you determine what is plot and what isn't from the mass of facts and events that have been gathered?
A plot is a specific path of events that affect the outcome of your narrative. If an event doesn't affect the story, it shouldn't be in your narrative.
Let's assume that Randy is the main character in a true crime story, and even though he is only a mailman, he decides to bring his wife's killer to justice because the police have given up on the case.
In the course of this story, however, Randy meets Maria in Miami Beach. He's trying to forget about what happened to his wife, without much success.
Now he finds himself, almost halfheartedly, going out to dinner with Maria, mainly because he doesn't want to be alone, and Maria's a good listener and good company. Before he knows what's happened, he's kissing Maria good-night.
Despite his preoccupation with solving his wife's murder, Randy begins to date Maria and get on with his life. However, after dinner one night, she announces she doesn't want to see him anymore because his obsession with his wife's death isn't allowing her into his life.
Finally, having solved the mystery of who killed his wife— and mundanely it turns out to be a next-door neighbor who thought, mistakenly, Randy's wife was having a lesbian affair with his wife—Randy is able to persuade Maria to come back into his life, because now he can finally put to rest the memory of his wife and put Maria first.
WHAT'S SUBPLOT AND WHAT'S NOT?
Connect the dots of this line of events, and you have a subplot about Maria that is, in this case, illuminating the emotional life (or lack thereof) of Randy, the main character. Ne
vertheless, the subplot is a different story, though connected to the first.
It is a subplot because of the following:
1. It occurs during the period of the plot.
2. It has some sort of connection to the plot. (In this case, Randy is releasing one woman from his life while gradually accepting another woman into his life.)
3. The subplot story line does not change the plot line but enhances it.
It's worth considering, however, that a subplot can, and often does, influence the course of the main plot. In our true crime story, for example, because Randy wanted a life with Maria, he made a conscious decision not to try and exact an "eye for an eye" revenge on his killer/neighbor, but to help in the guy's apprehension by the police. Without Maria's indirect influence on his life, Randy might have tried to exact a revenge that would have put him in jail for twenty years.
If, though, we were to think about this narrative in terms of fiction, another important element enters the picture. What if Maria was in cahoots with the killer? Her job was to romance Randy and divert him from achieving his goal of discovering and capturing the killer. At this point, Maria's story stops being a subplot of the main story line, even if she is still enhancing the emotional life of the main character, and her "subplot" becomes an integral part of the main story. Clearly, she has become one link in a chain of events that began with the murder of Randy's wife—and that now makes her part of the plot.
A subplot can be thought of as a sort of adjective that describes and enhances the noun that is the main plot. As a result, it doesn't include when Randy brushed his teeth, bought sauerkraut or turned on CNN. The subplot is not a collection of random events that somehow enhance the emotional life of the main characters; it is a specific path of events that tell a story.
THE DYNAMICS OF A SUBPLOT
A subplot should have the same kind of dynamic structure as the main plot. It should have a goal, it should have conflict, and it should have a point of view, which is not necessarily that of the protagonist, though most often it will be. It also subtly alludes to the answer to the question, Does your character have a life beyond the confines of your story?
The subplot, however, should not be a more compelling story than the main plot. If you find this happening, it is probably a good idea to rethink what you're writing and decide whether you should either drop that subplot or revise your original idea for a book so that subplot becomes the main plot. Then the entire project needs restructuring and rethinking in this light. Don't bring a subplot into a plot that is already complicated. The object is not to bewilder or confuse your reader, but to enhance and heighten the reading experience through an understanding of the characters' lives and feelings.
So what's the right number of subplots?
The answer is, there is no set number. Short stories and articles rarely have any. Many novels don't have any, although two or three is also not unusual. A good rule of thumb, however, is no more than three.
The question should be, What is the function of the subplot? If, as we've discussed, it is about enhancing the emotional life of the main characters, unless you're working on an epic story, you probably only want one, on average, per major character.
THE STAR OF THE SUBPLOT
The star of your subplot can be the star of your story or a secondary character. However, in any subplot, there must be at least one character who appears in the main plot. If you write a subplot in which none of the characters have any connection to what's happening in the main story, you haven't written a subplot, you've written a separate story. If you can remove a subplot without having any noticeable or subtle effect on your main story, that subplot shouldn't be there. It is a good way to look at how to edit your massive first novel of 2,000 single-spaced pages to a more professional and manageable 350-400 double-spaced pages.
Even linked short stories and novellas (stories longer than short stories but not long enough to qualify as novels), such as Raymond Carver's Short Cuts or Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, have a world and characters in common. Minor characters in one story strand become major characters in another. Such writing and plotting is the structural basis of many TV shows, such as NYPD Blue, ER, Homicide, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and is particularly strong in multistat cast shows. Often a main plot line will be echoed by subplots involving regular cast characters that somehow amplify and enhance the main story line.
When should you start a subplot? Most commonly, subplots begin early in a book, usually within the first quarter or first third of the narrative. They rarely begin late. The function of the subplot to your main story line will determine many of these kinds of questions. Remember, one of the primary functions of the subplot should be to enhance and dramatize the emotional life of the main character in connection to the events of the main story.
TO BEGIN OR NOT TO BEGIN WITH A SUBPLOT: THAT IS THE QUESTION
Quite often, as with Gary's Share the Dream, the subplot is a way of beginning a narrative. Remember, we said a story begins with an inciting incident, a first domino that knocks over a second and so forth. Structurally, you want to place that inciting incident where it will have the most dramatic impact. While the majority of stories should start with what kicks off the story, there are times when you delay the inciting incident until the end of the first chapter or the beginning of the second and you have to have something happening in the meanwhile. That something will be the subplot.
Suppose Greg is trying to get court permission to abort his wife Jennifer's pregnancy because she's in a coma from a car crash and the abortion will improve her chances for recovery.
The inciting incident for that main plot is going to be the car crash that puts his wife into a coma.
But if you decide to start with the car crash on page one, you risk not maximizing the emotional involvement of your characters with your readers because they don't know anything about the people in the story. You want readers to know and care about these people first, so you can begin with a subplot.
Perhaps the husband and wife have just concluded a verbal agreement to build a new house, one they desperately want. They are scrimping, borrowing and working like lunatics to get the money to pay for this house. Readers see the couple wandering around the property, talking with the real estate agent, the contractor, the architect; discussing the building's progress; making plans for designing and decorating the nursery, the kitchen, the garden, etc.
It's on the way home from one of these meetings that they drive around a corner and come face-to-face with a semi that is overtaking another semi on a bend. The husband has two choices: hope to survive a head-on collision with a Mack truck or pull off the road into the trees and take his chances. That's when he jerks the wheel and crashes the car into a tree, putting his wife's head through the windshield and into a coma, and plunging himself into a living hell of hard choices and personal recriminations. This is how you end chapter one.
Throughout the story of his decisions with his wife's health, readers still see the subplot of his dealing with the lawyers, real estate agents, contractors and bankers and perhaps running into the same bureaucratic mind-set he is encountering among the hospital professionals and the lawyers.
HOW TO END THE SUBPLOT
When is the subplot over? The subplot ends—or at least it should—when the main plot of a novel itself ends. A subplot often ends before the main plot comes to its climax.
The most satisfactory ending to a story with a subplot is for main plot and subplot to climax at the same time, the conclusion to one also providing the conclusion to the other. This is really hard to do and doesn't happen often. When it does, though, you know you have a well-plotted story, because no matter what you invent, it seems to naturally fit right into the story you're telling and clicks with or enhances an existing element.
In your story about Greg and Jennifer, it might work, for example, to have a subplot that stars a character called Toni. Her husband, Richard,
is the builder who is working on Greg and Jennifer's new house. When Richard discovers what's going on in Greg's life, he mentions it to Toni.
Toni becomes the personification of the antiabortionists who elect to protect the interests of the unborn child and block Greg's attempts to abort the baby and save Jennifer's life. But Toni is not a villain; she is a caring, well-meaning, religious woman.
Greg feels: Who are these people to barge into his life, after all the tragedy and heartache, and start telling him what he can and cannot do?
Toni and her group feel: How dare Greg arbitrarily play God and decide whether this unborn, defenseless child should be sacrificed for the sake of the mother? Doesn't Baby Doe have the right to exist, too? Toni and her group get the courts to award them guardianship of the unborn child.
One night, after drinking in a local bar, Greg walks into the car park and comes across a man and a woman having a violent fight in a car. Determined not to interfere, Greg walks away, despite the screams and shouts. However, his conscience brings him back, and he raps on the car window. Seeing the struggle still going on inside, but hearing only muffled sounds, he jerks open the door in time to see the man on top of the woman in the passenger's seat, strangling her. Greg pummels the man and pushes him off the woman, drags her into the car park and yells for help. The car drives off, wheels squealing. Finally, someone in the bar runs out and helps saying the cops have been called. To his surprise, however, the woman not only refuses to press charges against her companion, she berates Greg for interfering, saying it's his fault her man ran away and left her. Why didn't he mind his own business?
Returning to the hospital, Greg sees that while he may save Jennifer's life at the expense of the child's, it is unlikely she will ever be a shadow of the woman he married, if she even awakens from the coma at all. Objective advice is to deliver the child by cesarean and let Jennifer take her chances. To do that, however, Toni and her group have to agree to this course of action. Once the child is born though, ironically, guardianship returns to Greg as the child's blood relative.
