Hello, my name is Selah and I suffer from subplotoholism. When I get started with subplots I can’t stop. Which is probably why a project that was supposed to be one book is now planned out into five.
A lot of writing instruction books and articles tell you how to create and weave in subplots, but no one ever tells you how to keep them from growing out of control.
Subplots are essential to fiction novels of any size and scope. I like to think of subplot as the stories of the secondary characters. The better you’ve woven subplots into your story, the richer and more complex it will be. While the main plot may not resonate with every single reader, chances are a good subplot will carry those readers who aren’t completely swept away by your main plot.
Subplots allow for both a break from the tension of the main plot, and suspense as we wait for it to resume. Subplots prevent your story from sounding like one long string of events. They can reveal crucial information, building suspense when the reader has information that the characters don’t.
My subplot problem started when I began exploring my secondary characters’ motives. Once I started to see the secondary characters as individuals and not just tools of the main character/ plot, I started to see the story not as a single chain but as a web of interlocking events. It became tempting to include every single strand of this web in the telling of the story.
I’m lucky, or perhaps I should say it’s no coincidence, that I write in a genre where multiple POV characters and extensive subplots are expected. Even so, I have to restrain myself.
Here’s how I do it: I try to only include subplots that will directly relate to the main plot at some point down the line. Everything needs to happen for a reason.
If you don’t suffer from subplotoholism, you might not need such restrictions. Far from always needing to cross paths with the main plot, subplots can weave around the main plot in several different ways. A subplot can be an island, a single isolated scene. Or it can be a frame, referred to once in the beginning and again at the end. Or it can run like a frontage road alongside your main plot, never crossing paths but revealing two parallel stories.
But since I have to restrain myself, I limit myself to subplots which weave in and out of the main plot, returning, leaving, and returning throughout the story.
The most common subplot in my genre, and hence in my writing, is what I call the fork in the river subplot. Two subplots start out in parallel, like two mountain streams, and meet at a fork, where they then continue together. Or you could think of it as many streams (subplots) feeding a river (the main plot).
But, of course it’s always more complicated, so often subplots will diverge again, smaller streams born off the main plot to follow their own course until they curve back around and join up with the river again. But my goal is that all of the subplots will be feeding the river in its final dash toward the sea (the climax of the story).
One final beauty of subplots is that if you discover you need to remove one, you can usually do so without having wasted much time, because in writing it you will have discovered things about the characters and the story that you can incorporate in other ways. The web of interlocking chains of secondary characters is always there in the background. It’s our job as writers to decide which strands to illuminate and pluck forth into the story.
Tomorrow: 101 TIWIK #20: Pacing your Plot
This post is part of a series of 101 Things I Wish I’d Known Before I Wrote My First Book. Start reading the series at the beginning.
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