Don't Neglect Your Subplots (They Really Do Add Spice To Your Story)

Subplots are one of those things a lot of writers love to try their hands at, but not all writers are good at them. They're sort of like getting perfect icing on a cupcake; it's amazing when you get it just right, but if you mess it up then it's going to be really obvious.

Now, if you're going to include subplots in your story, I'd recommend keeping some of the following advice in mind... as well as avoiding some of the bigger mistakes that can ruin your special addition to the overarching plot!

Because it's very easy to scare your subplots, and they fall flatter than a soufflé when that happens.

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What Is A Subplot?

Subplots, or B Plots, are secondary storylines that are going on during the main story you're telling. For example, in Lord of The Rings, the main plot is Frodo's quest to take the ring to Mount Doom and destroy it. The major B plots are Aragorn's struggles to stop the rampaging armies of evil, and Mary and Pippin going off on their own, separate adventures. The reason these subplots work so well is that they all affect the main storyline in some way, they mirror the overall themes of the story, and they weave together neatly in the end.

Those are the things you want out of a subplot. It doesn't necessarily have to be a long-running, immersive thing that takes up a great deal of page space, but it needs to act as part of the ongoing narrative in some way, shape or form, and the subplot needs to be resolved the same way the main plot does (though not necessarily at the same time).

For folks who need another example of a subplot, one of my favorites that I've written is in my book Painted Cats. The main plot is that our Maine Coon bruiser Leo has been asked to find a missing cat named Mischief... but the subplot is that her kitten Trouble has sort of landed on Leo's doorstep. So while he is trying to find what happened to Mischief, Leo also has to help teach Trouble how to be a cat... particularly when it comes to fighting in New York back alleys. This subplot weaves back into the narrative when what Leo teaches Trouble helps him defend himself, and leads to a domino falling in the main plot. And, in the event I write more novels, this minor subplot is going to shape Trouble as a character, helping him grow into a protagonist in his own right, and possibly headlining his own series.

Seriously, grab a copy of this book if you haven't!

However, those are two examples of subplots that do work... what does it look like when a subplot doesn't work? Well, I'm glad you asked, because this reaches back to the early days of my career when I was editing for a small romance company. The company, author, and book shall not be named.

With that said, the main plot was that our protagonist was an Arabian noblewoman in a previous life, and her lover had been cursed into a piece of jewelry. A thousand years later the modern reincarnation of this woman finds the ring, and frees her lover from his metallic prison. The two of them must then confront the immortal sorcerer who laid this curse upon them in the first place, destroying him once and for all!

That's the A Plot of the book. The B Plot... well, it's about our protagonist's bestie.

So, from page 2 of this novel, we know that our protagonist's bestie is on the outs with her man. He seems to have cheated on her with a waitress, and now they're broken up. Her whole plot is trying to move on, and to find a new man. Her ex shows up 3 times throughout the book, and every time he does he is belligerent, unhelpful, and a general asshole all around. He never does anything to help out with the A Plot, nor does he do anything to contradict the view we've been given of him. There's never a scene where he shows up in his car to pick up the protagonist when she needed something, or an explanation that no, he didn't sleep with that waitress, but our protagonist's friend just won't believe him, and he's trying to prove that he didn't do anything wrong.

And at the end of the novel, said bestie and her ex are now together again... and this is supposed to be seen as a positive resolution even though he's still a massive dickhead who has been nothing but unkind to everyone around him, and did apparently cheat on his girlfriend who just took him back. No lesson was learned, no actual plot was affected, and it's a real sour note on what is an otherwise happy ending to the story.

The whole subplot was, in other words, pointless. The ex could have been removed from every scene he was in, and just never been mentioned, and nothing would have changed except the book became less unbearable to read. His ex taking him back means that she didn't learn anything, and neither of them grew or changed... and given the fact that said best friend just witnessed literal magic, a man reborn from over a thousand years ago after breaking an ancient curse, and the knowledge that our protagonist tried to find her lost love in every one of her dozens of lifetimes, the proper plot resolution should have been for the bestie to kick her ex to the curb, take back her power, and make it known that she won't accept anything less than this kind of love in her life.

And then maybe she meets a sweet, young EMT who comes to the scene of the sorcerer fight or something. The point is, though, that this is an example of a subplot that wasn't fun, wasn't a story in its own right, and added nothing to the book... which are precisely the sorts of subplots you need to trim off of your manuscript before you send it to your editors.

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That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, the Hardboiled Cat series about a mystery solving Maine Coon in Marked Territory and Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

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Age Needs To Be More Than Just a Number For Your Characters

Fiction is full of characters whose appearance belies their age. From vampires and aliens, to elves and mutants, there are a dozen tropes surrounding characters who are somewhere between long-lived and immortal. However, this is one of those areas where the urge to tell often overtakes the urge to show... and you really get way more out of these reveals if you show them to your audience rather than just tossing a number at them.

There's a reason this have been on my mind again, of late, for those who are wondering.

Doing It Poorly...

Giving examples is one of the best ways I've found to make solid points about techniques to use in writing, but I figured we'd get the most out of these examples by starting with the bad ones. And while there are plenty of potential examples out there, the one that bubbles to the surface in my mind is Twilight. I'm not even going to put an affiliate link for that book, that's how negatively I feel about the series, and the imprint it left behind on pop culture.

That's a whole separate blog post.

For this example, I'm going to use the film rather than the text. Simply put, the revelation of the vampire characters' ages tends to be done as matter-of-fact exposition rather than revealed through actions, speech, style, etc. We never have a moment where Edward has oddly dated speech or slang, or where he inadvertently reveals something telling (even if was a simple, "I learned to drive stick shift," cutting himself off before revealing he's older than automatic transitions, to say nothing of modern cars). In much the same way that the signs for him being a strange, inhuman creature are all blatantly just handed to the audience, we just get told his age instead of drawing out the suspense and letting us work for it. As such, it just slides right off of us without impact.

There are other vampire movies that do this (most whose names I can't remember, as they were only shown on Saturday afternoons by hosts with specific, spooky schticks), but we also see it in the original Dungeons and Dragons film. While a slapstick romp that's alternatively fun and cringe-worthy, there's a throwaway line in it where our comedy sidekick is trying to put the moves on an elven woman. Her curt response is to just toss her age at him (something absurd, I think it was in the 800s), and then to move on with her scene.

The issue is that in these examples, being told how old these characters are has no bearing on how we perceive them. It isn't reflected in meaningful ways, and there's no weight behind it. It's no different than being told someone is 26 or 40... we can mentally accept the age, but it doesn't affect the characters or the story in any way that re-contextualizes them.

Doing It Well...

From the other end of the spectrum, when a character's longevity is revealed over time, or in meaningful ways, it can be like a punch to the gut to the audience. It can make us feel for them, and at the same time add so much weight to the story, and their interactions in it, that the fact becomes impossible to ignore.

You probably know where this one is going.

If you've seen the extended edition of The Two Towers, then you already know the scene I'm talking about. However, in case you haven't seen it, for a swath of the film the young blonde Eowyn has been trying to catch our ranger's eye. One thing she does is make him some soup while they're on the trail; she's not much of a cook, but she tried. Then she brings up something funny her uncle said. He remembers Aragorn from when he was a boy, and said the ranger rode to war to war with Thengel, Eowyn's grandfather. Rather than laughing about how the king must be mistaken, Aragorn nods, and says he's surprised Theoden remembers, since he was only a small boy at the time.

We watch as Eowyn re-evaluates what she knows of Aragorn in that moment, going from playful, to surprised, to horrifically awestruck every time she guesses a higher number. Realizing in a way that is real for her, and thus real for the audience, that Aragorn's blood has made him long-lived, and that he has seen and done things far beyond the scope of a mortal's years.

It's not just the revelation that Aragorn is actually 87 when he looks like a rugged mid-30s, but Eowyn's reaction that drives it home. It casts all the skills he's displayed in a different light, and makes us look at him with a fresh perspective. It makes us realize that, for all his nobility, passion, and strength, that he is in a lot of ways an outsider to other people. That those who were afraid of the man called Strider might have had good reason to feel the way they did after all.

There are other instances of similar reveals really adding a lot to how characters are perceived. Wolverine, for example, played on this for years as we steadily realized he was far older than any living mutant on the heroes' side of things. Sometimes it was subtle, with mentions of certain bits of history that he was present for, or showing us skills he'd learned that he'd never showed off before. Other times it was blatant, with flashbacks in the 60s, World War II, and other eras where Logan looked the same as he always has. And in the Netflix adaptation of the Witcher, we see that Geralt is the stoic, grunting, easily annoyed curmudgeon many of us think our grandparents are... and that the mutations that make him so good at what he does might be responsible for his long life. Possibly feeding into the legends that Witchers have no feelings... because on a long enough timeline, everyone you knew or cared about will die, and you'll be left as their children, and even their grandchildren, grow old all around you.

Give Your Years Some Weight

If you're going to have characters whose age defies their appearance (or if it's something people just can't tell when they look at them in the case of strange or alien characters), don't just write a number on it. Writing a number tells us nothing, and gives us no value; it's just a fact.

Make us feel this character's age in big ways, and small ones. Show us the parts of them that never changed, and the little things that make them unique. Give us a glimpse into their inner lives, and show us a piece of their past that can put who they are and what they're doing into context. It's harder, yes, but you'll get a lot more oomph out of it, and it can make a character into an audience favorite if you do it just right.

Also, for more on this topic I'd suggest checking out the 4 Tips For Making Long-Lived Characters FEEL Old over on my sister blog Improved Initiative!

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That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife!

If you'd like to help support my work, then consider Buying Me A Ko-Fi, or heading over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page! Lastly, to keep up with my latest, follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and now on Pinterest as well!

The Dumitru Theory of Hobbit Supremacy: A Mixed Message in Lord of the Rings

I am an avowed fan of science fiction and fantasy. I spent my youth as well as a lot of my adult life first reading, and then writing high fantasy along with sword and sorcery. That said, I did not grow up with Lord of the Rings. I have not, in fact, read the books to this day. I have seen the films, and that combined with conversations I've had with friends who have read Tolkien is where most of my knowledge comes from.

I'd like to clear the air a bit at this point. I don't like hobbits. I don't find their furry feet adorable, I am not charmed by their prodigious appetites, and at no point in time do I find myself rooting for one of the little country bumpkins to come out on top. I do not view them as lovable underdogs; rather I see them as a bunch of bumblers who don't want to be on a quest, and even worse who have no skills to contribute. They are children playing at adventuring when there are plenty of hardened, combat-tested warriors who have a job to do and who would be imminently more qualified to take on the mantle of main character.

With that said, I still see the tropes and archetypes at work in Lord of the Rings, and I can appreciate them for what they are. The hero's journey, the fight against the great evil, the idea that power corrupts, and even the comparisons between the great war of Tolkien's time and the themes in his stories. I also, like anyone with eyes, picked up on the streak of "industrialism is bad" running through a large portion of LOTR. Mordor is a cesspit filled with rock, smog and slag, and Sarumon's corruption is represented by his breaking a pact with nature and destroying the forest while strip mining the land so he can arm a horde of killing machines to run rampant over Middle Earth. Everything would just be easier, it seems, if people could be content being simple country folk. Just like hobbits.

There's just one problem with that. Hobbits are the most technologically advanced people on Middle Earth.

The Dumitru Theory of Hobbit Supremacy

This is where the Dumitru Theory of Hobbit Supremacy comes in. First proposed by Alex Dumitru, this theory essentially states that in a manuscript with heavy overtones of industry leading to acts of evil and the defilement of the land, the author somehow overlooked that his quaint, folksy, backwoods protagonists are in fact centuries ahead of the rest of Middle Earth when it comes to crafting complicated machines and harnessing some of the more basic elements of modern technology.

Think about the Shire for a moment, what do you see? Quaint lanes with hobbit holes on either side, waterwheels in the creaks, a little farming village at peace with the elements. Hobbits lounging on their stoops, while nearby green gardens sprout, perhaps. Now imagine the rest of Middle Earth. Does anyone in Gondor have suspenders? Or buttons for that matter? Is there a single doorknob in all of Rohan? Is there a windmill anywhere in the whole of the kingdoms of man? Why do farmers with merely human appetites spend entire days doing back-breaking labor to keep their fields when hobbits can be idle nearly all the time and still keep larders that will feed a horde of dwarves? Where does all that glass come from? Or the dozens of leather bound books? Goods only nobles would be able to afford are commonplace in the Shire, and everyone seems to accept that.

It's clear that hobbits don't achieve any of these feats through magic, as they stare around gob-smacked at the idea of elves and the things they've achieved. The wider world appears to be a mystery to them, and their separatist attitudes tends to keep them at home, but it's a home that is cleaner, greener, and which requires a minimum of effort to keep up.

What That All Means

There are a few important questions readers should ask. For instance, do hobbits represent the ideal of industrialization, where everyone can be idle and pursue books and education instead of working all day? Alternatively is what Mordor has become the end of the slippery slope, and what a technological utopia such as the Shire might become if it grows too smart for its own good? Or is this all so much smoke, and Tolkien never thought about how advanced the little towns he'd seen and grown up in would really be when placed in a thoroughly medieval setting?