Storytellersunplugged

Sometimes, I think I’m never meant to finish my thoughts on the subject of subplots in a novel. I’ve been meaning to cover it for a while now, but other ideas pop into my head. As an example, I have recently run across several incidents that reminded me how important professionalism is in the industry and especially as a writer.
Yeah, I know, it’s not a fun subject, but as soon as I’m done covering the basics, I’ll get right back to the subplots, honest.
Especially in this day and age, I’d just like to point out that no matter what you say, the odds are it’s going to come back to haunt you later, especially if you send it in the form of an e-mail or post it on one of the many bulletin boards that exist out there.
Why? Because people keep records.
It might seem a trifling thing that you say, but in an industry where everyone knows everyone else, it’s easy to have even the smallest slights come back to bite you in your fanny when you least expect it.
A while back I posted on this very board about the troubles of not acting like a professional in public. I pointed out the delightfully friendly man who decided the best way to dazzle the editors he was dealing with—all of them female—was to try not only flirting with them, but also fondling them. The very same editors gave me kudos for not being that stupid and congratulated me on not ruining any chance I had at a career. None of them bought my books that year, by the way, but later on things changed. All things take time.
But it isn’t just what happens in public. There are plenty of things that you can do when you’re all by yourself at home and talking on the phone, talking with friends, writing on your LiveJournal, posting on a bulletin board, that can make your life absolutely miserable or put your writing career at risk to one extent or another. I tend to think that a lot pf perfectly sane people forget that what they say online can be recorded for posterity. Seriously. I know a lot of people who regret things they said in a fit of anger online that have not gone away yet and very likely will be coming back at them for years. If you read any of the online communities you know what I’m talking about. I don’t need to give any examples and I won’t because why help perpetuate the egg in the face these people are already dealing with?
“But Jim! I know this author who’s really, really famous and he’s also got a reputation for being a pain in the ass to everyone he meets!”
True enough. There are several examples that could be made about writers, publishers, editors et al who have and do make asses of themselves in public and get away with it. Some of them are even considered endearingly caustic.
Guess what? They ain’t you. For every hard ass that picks a fight at the drop of a hat and manages to keep a career, there are probably fifty who managed only to be remembered for their rampagingly bad manners or foul mouth. Now and then I still hear about a few of the people who were starting at the same time as me and managed to piss off the wrong people. They normally show up from time to time in bulletin board threads with names like WHATEVER HAPPENED TO… And quite often what is said about them has less to do with whether or not they could write and more to do with whether or not anyone remembers that time they urinated on the side of the couch in the big New York publisher’s party at a convention.
Call me silly. I’d rather be remembered for being a writer and hopefully a good one.
Now, that doesn’t mean I’ve been a saint. I’ve come close to losing friends because of a comment I made that was offhand, allegedly in an area that was extremely secure on the internet and was first, taken out of context, and second reported to somebody who should have never seen it. No, I won’t give specifics.
Long story short, what was said in a huff was copied and forwarded to somebody else. Should I have said it? Probably not. Should the person who forwarded it have done so? Definitely not. Though I do find it amusing that in order to protect the person who reported it, the person who heard the comment third hand actually tried to convince me that he had hacked into a satellite system to find the e-mail, an act that would have been close to impossible and patently illegal, just for the record.
In the long run it was foolish on all parts, but I learned my lesson.
A lot of people seem to not want to learn.
I’m not pointing fingers and I’m certainly not judging. I’m just advising caution. If you’re dealing with genre fiction especially, it’s a smaller community than you might think and anything you say has the potential to bite you and hard when you least expect it.
Okay, I know a few people are champing at the bit now and probably wouldn’t mind burning me in effigy. How dare I presume to tell you how to conduct yourselves? Well, I don’t. First, as I have said again and again, everything I mention in these articles should be taken with a grain of salt. They’re just my opinions. Second, sometimes a fight comes along where you feel so passionately that you absolutely MUST throw down a gauntlet. By all means, if it means that much to you, rage away regarding the latest slight by somebody you’ve read who snubbed you at a convention. (Or, for grins, back up your buddy who had the encounter and don’t worry about finding out the facts. It’s not like your friend might exaggerate, is it? No one I know exaggerates. They save it strictly for their writing. Honest.) You don’t need to consider that they might not have heard you in that lobby, or that they might have been engaged in a conversation when you cracked wise about how much you didn’t like a certain character in the novel. It doesn’t matter that they have never met you and you didn’t even introduce yourself. It’s all pointless, really, because in the long run, your talent will far outweigh any possible offense you might have done. It’s not like Author A even goes to the same bulletin boards you do, right? It isn’t possible that said author’s editor actually likes the author and might take offense to what you have to say regarding his personal hygiene or heritage. No one ever LURKS on bulletin boards, right? And even if they do, it’s not like the editors from all of the major houses know each other, is it?
Besides, when you finally sell that first novel, you won’t want a nice word from him anyway. Who needs blurbs?
I’m not saying you shouldn’t state your opinions or have opinions. I’m merely suggesting that if you intend to be a professional that you act like one. Don’t post it, send it, or say it if you can’t back it up and for the love of all that’s holy, don’t feel obligated to fire off multiple volleys of verbal artillery if you don’t expect to receive a little collateral damage on your side.
Just think about these thoughts for a couple of moments and try to remember them the next time you’re feeling a little too frisky: How many of the people you’ve seen going off on the boards are professional writers who have a career to consider? Now, how many of the people who’ve gone off on endless rants are people you’d really want to emulate?
Be civil. It isn’t that hard to do.
And now, on to subplots.
In almost any work larger than a short short story, you have the potential for subplots, those little side stories that flesh out the skeleton of your work. Personally, I love them. I think having information on the characters in your story that isn’t exactly prevalent to moving the narrative forward is a blast. I think that done right, they can help move the flow and pace of your story to the place where you want it to be and make the overall writing and reading experience ten times what it would be without them.
Subplots are an excellent way to flesh out the characters in your story and to expand the main tale in different ways. They can do a lot more, too, depending on how you handle them.
Look at it this way: subplots are the colored threads in the tapestry of your novel. They may not have to be there for the weave to hold together, but they certainly do add a lot of color and detail.
Let’s go over an example, shall we?
I’m going for one of my simpler novels as an example, because, well, let’s be honest here, I don’t want to write a ten thousand word article.
POSSESSIONS was the first novel I did with the main character of Chris Corin. On his eighteenth birthday his entire world gets shuffled around. First, he wins the lottery, guaranteeing that he will have more money than he ever needs for the rest of his life. Second and right around the same time, his mother is killed in a car accident that wasn’t exactly an accident. The end result of this one evening is that he’s lost his mother and now has to take care of his younger sister, Brittany, who is already more of a pain in the ass than he would like to think about.
Well, of course, there’s more to the story than that. The next thing Chris knows, there are shape changing monsters insisting that he give them the “Western Key” and plenty of other problems coming his way.
But that’s not what we’re here to discuss, is it? No, let’s investigate the subplots for a moment. Some of them are resolved through the course of the story and others are not.
“What’s that? You didn’t resolve them, Jim? Have you lost your freaking mind?” No. We’ll get to that. Be patient with me.
First, there’s the problem with Brittany. She’s four years younger and going through her own life and changes. She too is dealing with the death of her mother and the lack of a father figure in her life. She’s acting out, demanding attention and trying at the same time to prove that she’s big enough to handle herself. It isn’t long before her volatile nature is causing Chris no end of grief.
Wait, lack of a father figure? Yep. That’s subplot number two. Not only do the Corin kids not know anything about their father, they’ve never met him and any possible information about him is missing. All Chris has is vague memories of a man, and that’s more than his sister has. By the end of the first book and the second, he’d gotten no closer to knowing who his father is or was.
Grandma is subplot number three. We know almost nothing about her, but as soon as Chris’s mom dies, she’s there, a voice on the phone, trying to ease his burdens and take Brittany into her custody. Oh, don’t worry, she’s got her own agendas and they have nothing to do with what Chris wants or needs. It’s that sort of family. What do we know about grandma? She’s wealthy enough to think she can handle any legal problems and she and her daughter, Chris’s mother, haven’t spoken in almost twenty years.
A death in the family causes no end of red tape and paperwork. Chris has to deal with that too, and must find a lawyer to help him.
As you can see, Chris’s family life leaves something to be desired.
While he’s dealing with all of the above, he’s also dealing with the main plot, let’s not forget about that. He’s also dealing with a few issues that are not family motivated.
First, there’s Courtney. Courtney is his ex-girlfriend, sort of. They dated briefly, had consensual sex and then she dumped him. Chris has a thing for her that he refuses to acknowledge, made more complicated by the fact that she is best friends with the girl friend of Chris’s best friend, Jerry. Even if he wanted to avoid Courtney completely, that’s just not possible in his world. She’s everywhere.
To make matters worse, she’s around a lot more since his mother died. Is she being nice? Or is she suddenly interested in Chris again? If she is interested again, why?
Jerry is Chris’s best friend. Jerry has been the cause of numerous problems in Chris’s life (it’s what best friends do, right?) and he may as well be a brother. They’ve done damned near everything together for years. Along with his girlfriend Katie, Jerry has been there through the death of Chris’s mom and the funeral and everything else besides. Halfway through the story something bad happens to Jerry that leaves Chris in a bad state of mind.
At the same point in the novel, Katie is now looking to Chris for answers and both he and Katie are doing everything they can not to notice how much they like each other. It’s never been a problem in the past, but its there, a growing tension between them. He’s busily tryingto disvover what happened to his best friend and simultaneously trying not to get flustered whenever he’s around her. Keep in mind, bny the way, that he’s eighteen and only just really getting onto the whole emotional involvement merry-go-round. Before he was just dallying around the edge of the ride.
Then there’s the cop who should be looking into the attempted break in at Chris’s house. He’s disappeared and it seems like there might be a little something shady going on. Things get worse when Chris and Jerry actually see the man who broke in and try to call said cop for back up.
Chris’s long time nemesis, going all the way back to grade school is one of the neighborhood bullies, a walking brick wall with a serious reputation for hardcore violence named Bryce Darby. Just when things look bad, Chris manages to piss off Darby badly enough to get back on the bully’s radar.
Money problems. While it’s true that Chris has won the lottery, he hasn’t yet received the money. In the meantime, he’s spending what’s left of the cash he’d saved up for a European hiking trip to pay the bills. The hiking trip is now a pipe dream, because, of course, he has to contend with his little sister, the lack of funds, Bryce Darby, vanishing cops, Courtney’s sudden attraction to him and his own sudden attraction to Katie, as well as the disappearance of Jerry.
Oh, and then there’s the matter of Chris’s own depression and the fact that it’s getting worse. By the end of the first novel he’s unhappy. By the end of the second, he’s borderline suicidal. It isn’t stated in those words, but it’s definitely what’s going on with him. As far as Chris Corin is concerned, the weight of the world is on his shoulders and crushing him down into the ground. I will point out that for me at least, the subplots in POSSESSIONS were pretty straightforward.
Of course, in the second novel I also took the liberty of adding to the existing subplots and throwing a few more into the mix, because life tends to do the same sort of thing and despite the monsters in the closet I rather like trying to imitate life when I write.
Sounds like a soap opera, doesn’t it? Well, unless you’re living a life of complete solitude, you might have noticed a few soap operas in your own world. They’re what happens when you get to know people and interact with them. They are most definitely what happens in the life of the average teenager and said teen’s peers. It doesn’t matter whether you work at a bank, drive a truck or sit at home and write novels all day long, you will eventually have interactions with other people. If you care about them and vice versa, you’re going to have subplots.
So should your novel. Oh, you can make a novel without them, but I tend to think it’s going to be a very boring piece of work in most cases. Without the extra interactions within the story, I personally find that there’s not much you can learn about the characters, except for how well they respond to a crisis.
So, how many subplots should you have?
No earthly clue. Enough to work within the context of the story arc without clouding the tale with murk. How’s that for a vague answer? Too vague? Then try this. As many as you can handle that aren’t absolutely frivolous.
Do you have to resolve all the subplots?
No, not really. Just as in real life, a lot of things that are going on in your world probably won’t wrap up neatly and all at the same time. Some of them should be, certainly, the ones that revolve around the particular story you are writing, but not all of them HAVE to be resolved by the end. I warn you in advance, I get a lot of emails from people wanting to know what happened in some of the unresolved plot threads. My answer is normally the same. “Time will tell.” I may or may not revisit Chris Corin and his sister Brittany—who had her own spin off YA novel—but there are plenty of issues there that haven’t been solved on paper. In my head? Well, I know what happens next, but not necessarily how the entire situation comes to its conclusion.
That’s the fun of subplots, they are always there and can change without any warning. Yes, it’s a slippery slope to walk on, but if you do it right, I think adding a few subplots makes the entire tale more satisfying. It certainly does for me at least. And let’s not kid ourselves here, as I’ve said before, if you’re not enjoying the writing, you’re probably doing it the wrong way anyway.

James A. Moore