More on managing subplots

Will you do a post on how to handle subplots, specifically in a single-viewpoint story? I am relatively new to writing longer fiction and have never dealt with them before.

–E. Beck

My first reaction is that if you are having trouble with subplots, begin by ignoring them. Subplots aren’t necessarily things that are planned and deliberate, especially in a single-viewpoint novel. They can and do grow organically, and quite often the real problem is keeping them from sprouting up like weeds until the writer loses track of the main story.

The bare-bones common definition of “plot” is “what happens.” In real life, nobody ever has only one thing going on in their life at a time. Someone may be facing a major deadline at work while developing a romantic interest after hours, trying to coach their best friend through a crisis, having surprise house guests or family drama, and dealing with everyday problems like paying rent and cleaning house. All at the same time.

Characters in fiction have the potential for the same wide scope of “things happening” on many different levels, in many different areas of their lives. Therefore, if the plot is “what happens,” the subplots can be loosely defined as “what else happens at the same time.”

Of course, it’s not quite that simple. “What happens” in the main plot is what the writer chooses to focus on. A story in which two people meet, solve a murder, and fall in love, can be written as a murder mystery, with the murder as the primary story problem and the romance as a subplot, or it can be written as a romance novel, with the love story at the center and the murder as the background action subplot. (Romantic subplots are the little black dress of fiction—about the only type of story I can think of where including a romance subplot would be difficult is a Robinson Crusoe, sole-shipwreck-survivor-washes-up-on-deserted-island story where there is only one character present for 90% of the word count.)

And subplots can serve an awful lot of different functions in a story. There’s the contrasting subplot, that inverts the main plot or provides a different angle on it. Subplots can intensify the focus of the main plot, or expand its scope, or provide thematic connections/comic relief/general change of pace. And there are innumerable varieties of character development subplots, from the ones that slowly reveal a character’s angsty backstory, to the sort that establish skills or character traits that aren’t showcased in the main plotline. (The hero’s martial arts expertise gets plenty of air time in the action-adventure main plot, but his ability to make fancy French pastry is a lot harder to work in without a subplot.)

From the writer’s perspective, the key to managing all this in a single viewpoint is usually to decide what is important to the viewpoint character—and what events they know of—in addition to the happenings of the main story plotline. The viewpoint character is the one through whose eyes the reader sees everything. If the viewpoint character doesn’t see it, feel it, think it, or hear about it, the reader can’t, either.

This doesn’t mean that everything that matters to the viewpoint character has to become a subplot. It also doesn’t mean that all the subplots have to revolve around the viewpoint character. It only means that if the writer wants to include a subplot, then the viewpoint character has to care about the people/events at the center of the subplot, enough to register what is going on (so the reader can watch it through their eyes and reactions). The ill-fated romance between the sidekick and the villain’s head minion doesn’t directly involve the viewpoint-hero, but the hero can worry about the sidekick and act as a sounding board for the inevitable angst, giving the reader a bird’s-eye view of the whole subplot.

The flip side of this is that what’s going on in the subplots is not neatly contained in the three or six or however-many scenes that focus directly on each particular plotline. If the martial-arts hero cares about his sidekick’s romance and finding his niece a birthday present, those concerns are going to affect how he looks at, thinks about, and reacts during the events of the main plot, even if it’s only thinking “I wonder if Susie would like a leather coat like the one the villain is wearing” or hesitating when he has a chance to kill the head minion (because his sidekick still thinks the minion is redeemable, and even if he’s wrong, the hero just can’t do that to him right now).

Finally, subplot developments often take place offstage in a single-viewpoint story, because while the subplots are important to the main/viewpoint character, they aren’t as important as the main plotline. From the writer’s perspective, this means that when the viewpoint character spends three days chasing bad guys across the mountains, the writer needs to think about what is happening in the subplots that the viewpoint isn’t there to see. Ideally, some subplot crisis will be brewing offstage that will come to a head conveniently just as the exhausted viewpoint character arrives back (with or without captive bad guys in tow).

Keeping track of what is going on offstage is important. I use an Excel spreadsheet marked off like a wall calendar; Day 1 is the first day of the story, and as I finish a chapter, I fill in a couple of key phrases that tell me what happened on and off stage. That lets me keep track of where characters are (if they’re traveling), who met whom on what day, when Character A got the mysterious letter and how many days it took her to bite the bullet and show it to Character B, and so on. I started doing this back in my first novel to keep everything consistent, but it’s expanded as I realized how useful it is for reminding me what my off-stage characters (and their subplots) are up to at any given point in the story.

You probably also want to look at my posts on “Proliferating subplots” and “Managing subplots,” which are different takes on the subject that may or may not be helpful.