Making a Background Plot Work

I recently read a book that I found deeply frustrating because nearly all of the action-adventure part of the plot happened offstage. The viewpoint – who was consistently presented as the protagonist – only found out about the action later, when someone came back bloody and beaten and told him about each episode. So I asked myself:

Why did the writer choose this particular story-telling technique? It’s unusual, especially for an action-adventure tale.

Why didn’t it work? There’s nothing inherent in the technique that makes it unworkable. What went wrong this time?

Since I don’t actually know the writer in question, I can only speculate about what the writer was trying to do. The three things I came up with were:

1) The writer didn’t want to write action scenes at all for some reason – either they hate writing them or they think they are bad at writing action – and using this technique meant writing fewer action scenes.

2) The writer really, really liked their viewpoint character, but couldn’t think of a plausible way to have them present during the action, leaving conversations after the fact as the only way for both the viewpoint and the reader to find out what happened.

3) The writer wanted a fresh viewpoint on a fairly standard action-adventure plot, so they picked a high level manager/bureaucrat as their viewpoint character.

In the first case, leaving 99% of the action offstage meant the author only had to write two action scenes in the entire novel, so the technique did what the writer wanted. In the second, the writer got to use his/her favorite character as the POV, and managed to get the plot across, too, so again it did what he/she wanted. In the third case, the writer’s choice of viewpoint certainly gave an unusual angle on the action-adventure plot (especially since the viewpoint never actually “viewed” most of the action-adventure), so again, it did what the writer wanted. Regardless of the motive, I contend that the writer achieved their personal objective at the expense of the story.

The choice of viewpoint required that the action-adventure plot happen to other people, offstage. It doesn’t really matter whether the choice was made because the writer was avoiding writing action scenes, was in love with the character, or wanted to try something different. The result was that this reader, at least, found it intensely frustrating to get a build-up to a key problem or discovery, and then just hear about the good guys’ success when it was all over. It was the equivalent of the author of a sports novel spending several chapters building up to the championship game, ending a chapter at a tense point on the night before, and then opening the following chapter with the main character saying cheerfully, “Wow, that was a great game, wasn’t it? I’m so glad we won!” without ever explaining how the team won or what plays or players made it a great game…or even getting to watch the viewpoint character chewing his fingernails while waiting to hear what happened.

The obvious question then becomes: What would have made the technique work?

The two good examples that come immediately to my mind are the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “The Zeppo” and John M. Ford’s The Last Hot Time. And the thing that strikes me most clearly in both cases is that the action-adventure plot that happens in the background is very firmly in the background. Both protagonists have their own plots that are front and center – and in both cases, those plots are primarily emotional, involving the viewpoint character coming to terms with something important about themselves. The viewpoint character is, in both cases, undeniably the protagonist of their plot, even though they are essentially non-participants in the action-adventure plot. Meanwhile, the adventurers (including the hero of the action story) are all minor characters in the viewpoint-protagonist’s emotional plot.

This is possible because in both examples, the general outline of the action-adventure plot is extremely familiar, so that the writers don’t have to give a blow-by-blow rendering of what’s going on. All that’s needed is a brief snapshot of a high point or two: An adventurer asks the protagonist where the extra silver bullets are because “We ran out last night,” and then comments that they hope Maria gets out of the hospital before the next full moon. This is enough to let most readers figure out what’s happening with the action, without needing to go through a pages-long description of the fight with the werewolves in which Maria was injured. It’s background news, presented more as worldbuilding than as hints about a plot that will eventually involve the viewpoint character.

Furthermore, when the action-adventure plot in these examples does brush up against the emotional main plot, it is nearly always an intrusion or a complication. The protagonist’s secret massive crush is in his office, stammering nervously, and finally says, “I just wanted to tell you that Gretchen and I – ” and that’s when the cheerful adventurer sidekick pops in to ask about the silver bullets, leaving the insecure protagonist certain that his crush was going to end the sentence with “—are getting married on Saturday,” rather than “—are long-lost twins.” Or the protagonist is sitting in the corner of the cafeteria feeling depressed and insecure, and hears his adventuring friends worrying about Maria, but when he offers to join them in her place, they tell him he isn’t needed, because Maria is sure to be fine by Saturday…which naturally makes the protagonist feel even more depressed, insecure, and unneeded. In other words, the background action plot shows up mainly as either an interruption, or as an intensification/complication of the central emotional plot. Or, sometimes, both.

The mistake the writer of the frustrating book made was that they did not give the bureaucrat/manager protagonist his own plot. Instead, they treated the action plot – which directly involved every major story character except the viewpoint character – as the main plot, while continuing to treat the viewpoint character as the protagonist. This meant that the supposed protagonist never actually did anything except give his subordinates directions and take their reports afterward. There wasn’t even enough puzzle to the plot that he could pull all the information together at the end and triumphantly come up with the solution.