What is a subplot? It is a smaller story inside a larger story and it illuminates the life, times, personalities, themes and issues of the main characters, often by introducing peripheral characters and events.

In novels (and in films) subplots are typically the place that readers make their identification with the main character. Writing in helium.com, freelance editor Leigha Comer writes about the wildly successful Harry Potter novels:

How many people reading these books can sit there and understand how it feels to have a crazed, evil wizard try to kill us? Probably not too many. But how many of us know how it feels to lose a loved one, to have a crush, to fight with our best friends, or to despise someone so much that we consider them our greatest rival? Without its subplots, I can guarantee that the Harry Potter books wouldn’t be the success that they currently are. While none of us can go to Hogwarts, or pick up a wand and perform magic, we can still identify with Harry and other characters in the books. And with all of these different things going on in Harry’s life, and all the day to day problems, it becomes believable and true to real life.

She reminds us that in life, we are never confronting a single problem. Even as our boss is making life miserable for us, so we have situations in our personal and social lives. That’s what makes life interesting and seeing the main characters in several aspects of their lives makes them believable to us. How they cope in the many aspects of their lives helps us understand them better. Is the person who has the difficult boss, Comer asks, ignoring her children and husband to show she can do the job at work?

 I think of the television series Nurse Jackie, here. The main character’s work with patients and co-workers at a hospital is the main plot. Her life with her two daughters and her husband is a subplot. The way she seems always to half-heartedly spend time with them as opposed to her deep involvement in the high stakes world of the ER where she works informs readers about who she is and the risks of doing the kind of work she does. She has many secrets, and as she tries to compartmentalize them in the different areas of her life, they threaten to get out. This adds suspense for the viewer.

Even in short fiction, which usually doesn’t have well-developed subplots and focuses on one event, thinking about the character’s life outside the event pays off. Comer asserts that “when writing your story about a person on a sinking ship, don’t concentrate solely on the fact that the person needs to escape. Add some internal dialogue about that distant lover, and make it so that the urge to be together fuels your protagonist’s will to live.”

Your Turn
Here are two exercises in which you can gain practice with subplots by writing subplots that are missing from stories you know. In addition to gaining practice with subplots using the exercise ideas, you might also find you can develop the exercises into short stories of their own.

1. Do you remember the classic short story The Lady, or the Tiger by Frank Stockton? In it, a king has a particular method of dealing with those he doesn’t like–they must go into a ring and choose one of two doors–behind one is a beautiful lady and behind the other, a ferocious tiger. When the king discovers that his daughter is in love with a young man who is below her royal station, he wants to get rid of him by putting him in the arena, to either be torn apart by a tiger or married to a beautiful maiden of his station.

“The ranks of maiden youth and beauty throughout the land were carefully surveyed by competent judges, in order that, the young man might have a fitting bride in case fate did not determine for him a different destiny.” We learn that ultimately the maiden chosen is one the princess believes she has seen making flirtatious gestures to the young man. The princess has gotten word to her lover that she will know what is behind which door and signal him which to choose. He assumes she means the one with the maiden. But the author asks us to think about which we think she would choose–one that allows her lover to have a life with someone else or the one that will destroy him because of her jealousy.

In the story of the King’s intervention between the lovers, there is to be a search for the beautiful woman who is suitable for the lover but the search is not written. The princess figures out a way to learn what is behind each door, but we don’t learn what that way is. The daughter and the father don’t interact about his decree.

For practice with subplot, read this famously anthologized story and imagine where you might fill out the story. You could write the story of the men who must search for the maiden who will be behind the door. You could write the feelings and thoughts of the maiden chosen to be behind the door to illustrate her knowledge of and troubles with the princess. You could write interactions between the King and the princess. You might figure out where the Queen has gone and what she has to say.

2. Do you know the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard? In it the playwright builds a plot using two of Hamlet’s minor characters, schoolmates and friends of Prince Hamlet. The action of Stoppard’s play is described as taking place “in the wings” of Shakespeare’s play, with occasional appearances by Hamlet’s major characters in fragments of the original play’s scenes. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are of course confused by events that they did not participate in during Shakespeare’s Hamlet. This clever idea for a play helps illustrate subplot because it reverses what we normally view–events involving the play’s main characters become a subplot and the minor characters come to center stage.

You can borrow this idea for a writing exercise: Find or create a minor character for a story you have read–the kid across the street or a dog-walker who passes by each day, or an unhappy worker, for instance.

Write about an event in the story from this minor character’s point of view. What was this character doing at the time of the events? What was happening in his or her own life at the time? Why is talking about this event important to the minor character?

If you’d like, write a scene in which the main character does what he or she always does–writes a book, runs a company, keeps house–and comes up against obstacles you plot–writers block, a difficult worker, something going wrong with the kids or the plumbing. Write a subplot in which the main character meets the minor character you have invented. What happens that illuminates the main characters’ concerns? What happens that ultimately helps the main character overcome an obstacle? What happens that keeps the main character from overcoming an obstacle?

More on Subplots
In his book Novelist’s Essential Guide to Creating Plot, J. Madison Davis names two subplot categories.

Parallel subplots: When subplots go on for awhile parallel to the main story, readers get a view of things from someone’s perspective other than the main character. However, eventually, the parallel story must connect with the main story or the reader will feel bored, let down, or confused about the parallel story’s value. Movies such as Crash, LA Stories, Nashville and Short Cuts are good examples of multiple parallel stories in which certain characters connect the stories. Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper also has parallel stories as the boys trade lives and live in the situation they each thought they wished to live in. Hailey Mills’ movie The Parent Trap has a similar turn of events as twins meet at summer camp but return to one another’s home, unbeknownst to the parents.

Episodic subplots: When stories involving the main character form a chain of adventures for him or her that are stories in and of themselves, readers follow the character’s journey through these adventures to safety and/or home. Stories with episodic subplots that we’ve read in school are A Thousand One Arabian Nights and The Odyssey. If the Harry Potter stories, or any story with sequels, were presented in one novel, they would be episodic.

Authors also consider flashbacks as subplots, although they warn that using flashbacks is risky because they interrupt action in the now of the story in a way that can frustrate readers. Still, well-placed flashbacks help readers accumulate knowledge of the character motivations. When Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is a part of the main character’s life, for instance, events in the now of the story set off memories from before the story began. Seeing aspects of the character’s life in well-placed flashbacks can inform the story, build interest and set up suspense about what the character will do given the back story.

In the novel Flash Forward, and in the recent television series loosely based on the novel, writers have played with the concept of flashbacks by using flash forwards. In these stories, everyone on earth went unconscious at the same time and have seen themselves in a situation that will occur in the future; it is presumed that those who didn’t see themselves in the future will be dead. The stories that come of characters trying to find others who were in their flash forwards and of characters trying to ward off what will happen to make them lose their lives create subplots, while the main story is about a core group of FBI trying to figure the event out.

Your Turn

Here are exercises to help you play with parallel, episodic and flashback/flashfoward subplots. Again, the writing you produce will help you build subplot writing skills but may also become short fiction of its own.

1. Flashbacks/Flashforwards
Think of a time in your character’s life or in the life of a character from literature that occurred several years before the story starts. What in the character’s life today makes him or her remember that time? Write a piece in which the character indulges him or herself in memories of that time. If you’d like, practice putting pieces of the flashback into the action of the story you took the character from. See if you can make the flashbacks occur in a way that doesn’t annoyingly frustrate the reader, or, if you’d like, intentionally annoy the reader making them frustratingly pause for flashbacks.

What might the character you’ve chosen have a premonition about? Write a piece about that premonition. Fully imagine the scenes in the premonition as well as the character’s reactions.

By thinking about how your character deals with the memories and premonitions, you may create two complete short stories, one story made of two parts, or a kind of subplot you can entwine in a larger story. If you take a character from an old short story written in English, you will probably find that the short story is out of copyright and in the public domain. You could write an original piece inserting your subplots into the main story.

2. Parallel Subplots
Think of two minor characters from a story you’ve written or one you’ve read. Write two parallel subplots concerning their individual lives when they are “off stage” in the story they came from. For instance, for instance:

Tales and fables are an old fashioned type of short story. They usually convey traditions or teach a moral lesson. Imagine taking one and adapting it to the stage or screen by writing parallel plots to flesh out the story and keep it interesting to your audience. For instance, in “The Inn,” a tale by Guy de Maupassant, a mother and her daughters hike with a young Swiss man named Ulrich Kunsi to their family’s inn in the mountains. Kunsi will be caretaking the inn over the winter along with an older man named Gaspard Hari while the family remains in the village. Kunsi takes an instant liking to one daughter in the family and spends his winter longing for her. One day, Hari leaves the inn to do chores and doesn’t return. Kunsi searches and searches for him, but to know avail. For the rest of the winter, Kunsi believes he hears Hari moaning nearby. In spring, after the roads are clear of snow, the family returns to the inn and finds Kunsi has gone mad.

Choosing characters from this story, you could write parallel subplots that involve the daughter in the village and how she is longing for Kunsi just as he longs for her and about Hari, who may not be dead but is actually haunting Kunsi. Or you might write two parallel subplots in which each character is in their own way as isolated as Kunsi is at the inn–perhaps the daughter is isolated from her family for emotional reasons and Hari is isolated from the inn due to ice and weather or a fall. What do these characters think, see, feel, deal with and remember? When will you have the characters lives intersect or become linked and how?

3. Episodic Subplots

To practice writing episodic subplots, think of a character on a journey. This character can be on a simple journey that becomes complex. In a children’s story, for instance, a mother might tell her child it is time for the child to get into pajamas for bedtime. While the mom is finishing washing the dishes, the child may journey from the kitchen to the bedroom, but have many adventures on the way–feeding goldfish, playing with a dog, completing a puzzle, dreaming about climbing a tree that is outside the house, etc. Maybe the pajamas are in the laundry basket in the basement of an old house and the journey involves getting to the pajamas and having spooky adventures on the way. Or maybe the pajamas are on a clothesline outdoors and the adventures involve noticing the outdoors and creatures in it in a new way.

An adult journey might be something like this: A wife asks her husband if he brought home something he promised to get while on a business trip, and he says he didn’t. When she asks how come, he can relate a series of adventures that kept him from completing the task, entertaining her and easing her annoyance.

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Writing subplots for fun will help you learn to fill out the stories you create, whether they are short or longer fiction. Next week, we’ll discuss tweaking your work for purposes of tone.