Using subplots to add depth to your novel

Ari Meermans

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I just wrapped-up my novel beta reads for the year—there's one last invite out there which may or may not come through—and I've noted missed opportunities for adding depth via the subplots. There are a number of literary devices available for use in subplots to elevate your book from good to great. Two of my favorites are mirroring and contrast, for instance.

I'd like to open up a discussion of the devices you're using in the subplot(s) in your current WIPs to add depth to your novels*. Anyone willing to share with their fellow writers?



*'cause as we all know, subplots-as-fillers ain't gonna cut it.
 

Bufty

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I didn't know there were 'devices' for subplots.

I can't explain how twists/sub-plots in my Fantasy tale come about - they just did as the tale unfolded. I am not a pre-plotter.

Am I way off the mark in answering the question?

ETA - Post#6 below helps me grasp what the various 'devices' mean. Thanks.
 
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The Second Moon

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Again, I have no idea what this 'device' is called and that's maybe why there aren't too many replies here.

I didn't know there were 'devices' for subplots.

I can't explain how these (and other twists/sub-plots came about) - they just did as the tale unfolded. I am not a pre-plotter.

Am I way off the mark in answering the question?

Me, too. I didn't know there were devices for subplots so I looked up some, but I am still confused.

Anyways I'll answer the question the best I can.

My sub-plot travels through the whole MG series. It is about an inventor who is afraid to love, his 12-year-old assistant (the MC) who lives with him, and all the crazy adventures they go on. The assistant wants, more than anything, for the inventor to always be there for him and to always care about him.

I guess this is more of a "family romance" subplot, but the inventor and the assistant aren't family.

My beta reader and a few who have read the book (or parts of it) think the relationship between the inventor and the assistant is fine and didn't see a problem with it. But when I describe the sub-plot to others some think it isn't healthy. So...:e2seesaw:

But I won't get rid of it since it helps hold the whole book together and adds that emotional punch.

Hope I answered your question right.
 

lilyWhite

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The subplots in the series I'm currently working on tie into the main storylines, and also serve to reinforce the themes of the main storyline.

For example: In the first book, two of the subplots are one of the main character's friends struggling with a past trauma and another one of her friends having distanced herself from the rest of the group and her past passions. Two of the themes of the story are how friends will support you in doing what's best for you, even if it might come at a personal sacrifice to them (which is reflected in the first subplot), and following your heart and embracing what brings joy into your life (which the second subplot ties into).
 

Ari Meermans

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Ahhh. Okay. I had to go spelunking and I found this article: 5 Basic Literary Devices That Will Deepen Your Fiction. Maybe it'll help explain what I was going for though there are any number of permutations to be derived from each point made there. It'll maybe set you to thinking.

What started me on this: I recently re-read a book in a series by a favorite author. I've re-read the series several times—it's one of my all-time favorites—but this one particular book (well into the series) "calls" me back time and again, so this time I set about determining what it was about the book that the cosmos thinks I need to learn. Writing related, of course.

It was the skill with which mirroring, contrasting, and a foil character were employed. The characters including the foil and their relationships with each other were well established within the series by this time but a horrific incident occurred ("off-screen"but you learn about it in bits and pieces along the way which lead up to the whole story) which left devastation behind in all their lives—physically, emotionally, and psychologically. Deep attachments are destroyed seemingly beyond repair and careers are ruined. Not one character including the MC comes out of it whole. It was a freakin' tour de force and the psychology is so very believable.

So.
 

Chris P

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I think the best subplots up the stakes for the main plot. Can what is going on in the subplot come back and bite the MC's butt in a way that makes a failure in the main plot more dire?

I once added a costly expansion of the MC's corporation that provided an opportunity for the insider bad guy to misdirect funds. If he got exposed for the main plot the MCs were trying to cover up (his sexual interest in the teens in the corporation's youth outreach program) it would be worse for the MCs because the financial crimes would be exposed too. It increased the power the bad guy had over the MCs, added depth to the plots and characters, and added a few thousand words to get it to the right length.
 

onesecondglance

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I typically write thrillers, so for me, the main plot is usually about events external to the character, whereas my subplots are about the internal side of things. That's not to say that the subplots are sitting around introspecting; it's that they usually arise from the character's personal interactions, rather than being the big machinery of the main plot and the antagonist.

Something that's important to me is that the subplot shouldn't be a tangent. It should intertwine with the main plot and provide complications as well as contrast. Say, for example, that what the protagonist wants to do to resolve the subplot will damage their progress with the main plot, or vice versa - that creates some interesting tension.

To put some bones on that, let's take a (fairly standard) story where you have a career criminal who wants to reconnect with his family, but is forced back into a Life Of Crime (tm). So your external plot events, the A plot, are focused around the criminal element, and the internal plot events, the B plot, are the family*. Because these two elements are inherently opposed, you can use them to create conflict. The classic example for this type of story would be a family gathering like a birthday party; our protagonist turns up intending to focus on the B plot, but then one of his criminal buddies (from the A plot) turns up at the party. Instant conflict and the chance for a dramatic scene.

The classic way to escalate this type of story is to have the two (still opposed) plots combine at the end of the story. The antagonist takes the family hostage, that sort of thing**. With that, resolving both the A plot and B plot will require the same action from the protagonist. For extra bonus points, the protagonist could defeat the antagonist with something they've learned from the B plot, e.g. in reconnecting with their kids, the MC has learned that their daughter can sing a high note that shatters glass, so the MC get the daughter to do that and uses the distraction to save the day.

So far, so by the numbers. Let's take another example of a B story: the love interest. In THE MATRIX, the A story is about Neo coming to believe he is The One. The B story is him falling in love with Trinity. While these two elements are not in conflict like the example above, they are again on the lines of external plot action vs internal plot action. Here, Neo - a loner at the opening of the film - can only triumph thanks to Trinity's love, which literally brings him back from the dead when the A and B stories cross at the end. It is only thanks to the B story that the protagonist can complete the A story. The B story is not as central to THE MATRIX as in the example above, but it does pop up at all the most vital moments; Trinity's interactions with Neo almost always push him forward into the main action.

I'd note that these are somewhat formulaic examples, and there are probably folks reading this who are thinking "but my work is more complicated than that", but it helps to talk in clichés when discussing plot devices since clichés provide very clear examples. A good part of the fun of writing (for me, at least) is working with far less clear examples, inversions, etc., but those require a lot more analysis and are tough to work with when you're not familiar with the kind of techniques we're discussing. As with all "the rules", once you have an understanding of the principles behind the simple examples, you can start bending and applying them with care to more complex work.


*: you could make a less cliched story by inverting this priority; having the family and relationship be the A plot and driving the majority of the action, with the recidivism element being a B story.

**: ANT-MAN (2015) follows this template exactly, but throws in a "C" story as well: the original inventor of the shrinking suit, Hank Pym, and his relationship with his wife, Janet. The protagonist, Scott, saves the day by learning from Janet's example, rather than necessarily something from his B plot. I'm not sure this is as successful, though $500 million at the box office argues otherwise. (Honestly, the antagonist is more related to Hank than Scott in the first place, which is one of the other reasons I don't think the story quite hangs together - but again, that's just me.)
 

Paul Lamb

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Everyone has plenty of "stuff" going on in their lives, plenty of subplots to the story of their life. Inasmuch as you want to make your characters "real" and "credible" to readers, you want to show them having lives fuller than what is directly happening in the plot. (Or at least hint at a fuller life.) The subplot may eventually service the main plot in some important way, or it may elucidate the characters so the reader can better empathize and/or understand the character's actions/choices. The subplot may merely be there to enhance the tone or theme of the story. An ongoing effort to stop biting his fingernails, her anxious anticipation of an important letter that isn't coming, their memory of the big loss last year that should have been a win, how to stretch dinner enuf this week to make the groceries last.

What are the things that are also going on in your life, and how can your character have something similar?
 

lizmonster

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Something that's important to me is that the subplot shouldn't be a tangent. It should intertwine with the main plot and provide complications as well as contrast. Say, for example, that what the protagonist wants to do to resolve the subplot will damage their progress with the main plot, or vice versa - that creates some interesting tension.

Very much this.

I'm like Bufty, in that I don't really do any of it consciously. It's common for me to have a boatload of subplots in a rough draft, and a lot of them get tossed (or set aside for future consideration). The ones that last to the final version are the ones that are entwined with the larger plot, and end up driving the book's climactic point.

Ari, your link talked a lot about character, and that resonates as well (although like the plotting stuff, I do it unconsciously!). I always seem to have one character who's changing a lot through the story, and the others serve as anchors (or go through similar changes but with different - frequently less dire - stakes).
 

Ari Meermans

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That article was the closest I could find to what drove me to start the thread and I don't know why that is 'cause my thinking can't possibly be unique. Fully-realized characters and relationships between characters provide the emotional anchor for your readers. It doesn't really matter what emotions you conjure in your readers—even anger and frustration have immense value—they have to feel something to stick with a book.

Each book in the series I mentioned is a self-contained story and, as such, is a standalone but the overarching plot of the entire series is a slowly encroaching storm at the horizon and as with any storm of its magnitude, when it hits it leaves utter annihilation in its wake. Will these people survive? Who will? Who won't? And, if they do, how do they survive and how will they be changed? That's how you invest your readers.

Thank you all for the thoughtful answers you're giving. They're tremendously helpful to others who are looking for ways to deepen their stories.
 
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litdawg

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Although I'm a pantser too, my approach to subplots is guided by the fundamental dynamics of the world I'm creating. I think they all fall under the umbrella of mirroring. A key aspect of the world I'm working with is the impulse toward controlling others, whether that be expressed through an interplanetary war of dominating a mutant underclass, or the genomic engineering necessary to control the physical traits of offspring, or the emotional manipulation involved in controlling a marriage partner, or the sort of logrolling necessary to control a legislative body, etc. I've got about a half-dozen subplots with related arcs that go through the failure/destructiveness of control and then climb back into a more redemptive collaboration/love across differences path. While I can see and describe how the various arcs go to illustrate the same point, I don't think it's readily evident to readers. After all, the science plot, the marriage plot, the war plot, and the artificial intelligence/politics plot unfold with different vocabulary. Yet they are nested plots that give the world coherence.

I've thought about this as the logic of my world--what are the fundamental dynamics that drive the society towards destruction and which must be overcome to achieve harmony? So when I'm pantsing along and come up with a subplot relevant to a character, my internal tests on whether I stick with it derive from the fundamental dynamics that I see structuring my world.

ETA: I read the linked article and I should probably describe what I'm doing as parallelism rather than mirroring.
 
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Woollybear

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I've loved the ideas of contrast and mirroring, but compartmentalize them separately from subplots so we may be talking apples/oranges.

Mirroring, to me, is reflecting the principle characters at the end of a novel facing their starting point. They are the same, but also 180 degrees different. A reluctant hero who refuses a quest accepts the quest and becomes more and different than she was to start with.

Contrast, to me, is a sentence-level and higher device to use throughout the narrative. Adding an opposing action to an emotion would be an example of contrast.

There are other levels of contrast too.

Subplots.

I think the device I use/imagine (and i haven't read the links but will later today) is to give every character (within reason) a goal, and subplots arise from this. There are around two dozen characters in my soon-to-be-self-published novel and probably at least a dozen of them have a goal that one can (~easily) see. Sometimes for minor characters the goals are simple, like 'save the wheat crop' and other times they are more complex.

The main subplot that arose from this approach manifests in the MC's journey. His mother's goal (a secondary 'villain' type character) becomes something he must deduce, and doing so impacts his journey. So its a secondary story--following her and what she wants through the lens of the MC. She's rarely on the page at all, but he dwells on her. She's not the main 'villain.'

So, my answer Ari, is that you've given me something to think about and i appreciate that, the idea of contrast and mirroring in plotting. Up til now, I get the most mileage out of giving each character (within reason) their own goal--it really deepens the story remarkably (which you know) and leads to subplots.

But I suspect that's not what you meant...

(p.s. nice link! I've decided to use that as the excerpt I take to writers' club this week, not claimed as my own writing, of course, but as a basis of discussion for my 'spot' in the evening. I've done so little writing lately...)
 
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WeaselFire

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I've read betas that have no subplot where the writing is good but the story fails to engage. And I've read betas where the sub plot has no relation to the plot or story line of the book. I have never seen books like either in print.

I'm not sure that it's because the writers don't know how to do a sub plot as much as they don't understand the reason for the subplot in relation to the main plot. The article posted is an interesting read, but I don't think it will help those authors who don't understand the basic concept. I think simply reading and analyzing good published fiction will be their salvation.

Jeff
 

RichardGarfinkle

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To me subplots arise naturally from the lives and interactions of the characters. Each different combination of people will have different shared interests, concerns, and conflicts. A subplot relevant to the story can be generated by putting together such a combination and seeing how it flows. This can happen in parallel with the main plot or the main plot can divide into subplot threads and then braid back together.