Is Your Story Too Busy? (Plots, Subplots, And When Enough is Too Much)

I've said before on this very blog that if you're writing a novel you should feel free to spread out and sprawl a bit with your story. You've got a lot of word count to eat up, and if you're a genre writer you don't need to really start wrapping stuff up until you're within sight of 100k words. Today I'd like to look at the other side of that coin, though. Because there are a lot of writers out there who will toss everything they can think of into their story, but rather than stone soup, the result tends to be a big mess of ideas and ingredients that might have worked fine on their own, but just end up being overwhelming when put together in a single book.

Because it's possible to put too much in.

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How Much Is Too Much?

It's not uncommon for a story to have subplots. In fact some genres seem to almost require them in order to balance out what it's offering us. Because our main plot might be about a detective trying to catch a serial killer who's come out of retirement, but at the same time our protagonist may also be trying to be more present in their child's life in a way they weren't the first time this killer was running amok. Maybe they have some sort of counseling to fulfill, or there's a new romantic partner they're trying to get to know. Perhaps they're trying to produce a screenplay, or to write a novel of their older experiences on the force when they were young.

Now imagine trying to cram all of that into a single novel.

Even Dashiell Hammett would find that a handful.

The important thing to keep in mind when you're telling a story is that readers, even the best of them, are housecats. If you distract them too much, or you offer them too many toys, or you let hem wander off for too long, they're going to completely lose the thread of what you going on about. Worse still, they might decide there's just too much going on here and move onto something tighter and cleaner that holds their interest a little more strongly.

And that's before we discuss the question of whether you are capable of actually wrapping up all of the various subplots going on in your story and bringing the main tale to a successful completion. Some writers can. Some of us think we can, but end up biting off far more than we can chew.

I don't recommend foregoing subplots altogether. In fact, I highly recommend adding them into your stories. However, before you do so, it's important to ask yourself a few things. Is this subplot organic? Does it serve a purpose within this particular narrative? And lastly, is it going to be interesting to read?

Because if you haven't read this yet, you really should!

In Painted Cats, the main plot is Leo trying to track down a missing alley cat named Mischief as a favor to an old flame of his. While there's twists and turns to that, the A-Plot is finding what happened to this cat who up and vanished. There are two subplots in this story, though. The first is Leo building a relationship with Trouble, Mischief's kitten who just wants to find his mother. The second is resolving the history between Leo and Delilah, his old flame who comes asking for a favor in the first place.

Now, I could have excluded both of those subplots from the novel without doing a lot of damage to the main story. However, I think the book would have suffered if I cut out all the parts about Leo teaching Trouble how to fight, and how to be a tomcat since the kitten didn't have a father to pass on that knowledge. And while I could have just left things between him and Delilah on a mysterious note, I feel like it tied the story up nicely, and ended her arc without leaving a dangling thread.

There's other stuff I could have tried to include, if I wanted to. I could have put in a whole plot about Gino's deli getting in financial trouble, and Leo having to help out on Instagram by becoming a minor cat celebrity to bring in business. I could have worked in something about the ex-fighting dog Doc and a problem he was having at home. I could have expanded Lucky's role in the plot, or had Leo trying to settle beef with a minor gang lord to secure a favor. I didn't, though, because I felt those things would have interrupted the flow of this particular story, and the themes I was working with (showing that Leo is more than just a heavy, for instance).

Every story is unique, and some of them have more room in them for subplots than others. Some genres and setups lend themselves better to subplots than others, too. I've usually found, though, that you're best off if you can keep the subplot relevant to the story in some way, if it fits organically into your narrative, and if it shows something about your cast that the main plot won't in order to give your audience a fuller perspective.

If you can do that, you'll find that it all comes together pretty neatly by the end!

Looking For Additional Reading?

If you're looking for additional stuff to check out before you go, might I recommend the following?

- 5 Tips For Creating Fantasy Towns and Cities: I've been up to my elbows in professional fantasy world building for most of this year, and these are the tips I've found most useful for making sure places feel organic, no matter how fantastical they are.

- The Silver Raven Chronicles Part One: Devil's Night: A free fantasy short story, this tale begins in the old quarter of the city of Kintargo. A rumor whispers in the corners of a ghost risen from the past to take Cheliax to task for allowing devils into its heart, and its throne room. Most don't believe it... but one of the city's dottari finds this ghost is all too real when it steps out of the shadows with a message for her to spread to her fellow enforcers. They are no longer welcome in his city.

Like, Follow, and Come Back Again!

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 cat noir novel Marked Territory, its sequel Painted Cats, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

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