First off, thanks to everyone who commiserated about the computer crash. I now have all my critical data back (including my in-process Skyrim game! Very important, right up there with the email archives, the address book, and the calendar. Books? Those were never the problem; I’m paranoid about backing up work-in-process, finished work, copyedited versions…) So I’m totally back in business.

On to the writing stuff. Today I thought I’d take a shot at a problem that caught my eye in an enormously fat, complicated novel I read recently: handling subplots. The book was engaging and competently done, overall, but halfway through I started feeling a little odd. At first, I thought it was a subtle problem with the pace, but the scenes all seemed to be moving along just fine. I finally realized that the trouble was with the subplots.

As I said, this was a fat, complicated novel. Meaning, lots of subplots. There were several romances, two or three different political plots, a bad guy converting to the good guys, two sets of long-lost relatives, a secret birthright, and a whole raft of interrelated action plots helping the build-up to the climax. The book started with the background and the first action-plot, and just as the action was passing its first big peak, the author introduced the romantic interest. We then had a couple of chapters of the romance, at which point the first big political plot showed up. Politics occupied the next few chapters, and just as the big political problem was solved, the action moved into its next phase. And so on.

Each subplot or plot arc would be almost finished when the author started dropping hints about the next, completely different, subplot or arc. By the time the current arc was disposed of, the next one was bubbling along nicely and ready to take off without giving Our Heroes more than a few minutes of down time.

It should have been gripping. It wasn’t. And the reason for it was threefold: first, the pattern quickly became predictable; second, the author was so locked in to the pattern that she/he kept it up right to the end of the book (yes, that means that in the last two chapters, right before the villain was defeated for good and all, the author introduced a new plot…which of course was never wrapped up. I wanted to spit nails; that scene would have been the perfect opener for a sequel, but as something dropped on the reader at the end of a book, coming out of nowhere, it really didn’t work for me); and finally, I couldn’t believe that all these subplots would come along in quite such tidy duckling fashion, one after another, with just enough overlap that they didn’t look like a bunch of short stories strung together.

Basically, the author was focusing on one thing at a time: first the setup, then an action arc, then the first romance, etc. Now, some things really had to happen in order; the villain had no particular reason to kidnap the heroine until after the hero fell in love with her, for instance. But I just couldn’t buy that both the villain and the evil politicians were going to hunker down and do nothing for two weeks while the hero and heroine fell in love, or that the sidekick and his love interest would go through several hair-raising adventures showing no interest whatsoever in each other, then have their two-week romance while everything else was suddenly on hold.

In real life, everything is happening all the time. National politics didn’t get put on hold for four days while I got my computer back up and running; neither did my exercise program or the people coming to install my new water heater. And in fact, my computer got fixed as fast as it did thanks in large part to some timely tips from my walking buddy.

Subplots need to weave around each other in the same way. Some things have to happen in order or in totally different and unrelated places, but there are an awful lot of things that can overlap for more than one scene or ten minutes. The politicians and villains and evil corporations will be plotting and making moves all the time, separately or together, whether the hero is taking a well-earned vacation or not.

Once the writer grasps this, the problem becomes keeping track of what everyone is doing and then figuring out how to bring it into the story so that one doesn’t have subplot lumps. I’ll try to talk more about that on Sunday.

7 Comments
  1. Glad to hear your computer problems have been resolved. I think weaving in information about subplots at the right time can be challenging. One of the things I did when revising my novel was to look at each character’s story (the main character and some of the secondary but important characters) to see where they could intersect.

  2. Sounds like a very involved story to have that much going on. I’d be interested to know what book it was.

    I used to not mind when books left off with a major cliff hanger, but the more I read, the more it bothers me. Usually it’s because the author hasn’t figured out how to write a balanced arc. I hate when a book has nothing going on, nothing, nothing, nothing, and then finally there’s some action and some build up and … then the book ends. GRRRR! Rather than entice me to read the next book, this just makes me avoid reading books by that author.

  3. Oh Sunday, hurry up and come! I need that advice. I’m currently doing a sort of retroactive outlining in an effort to keep my current work, which has four POV characters and subplots that I have to beat back with a stick, coherent.

    Is there a term (other than wishy-washy) for those of us who go back and forth between pantsing and outlining?

  4. Off topic: have you any idea whether your Enchanted Forest books are legally available as e-books? And the same question for Sorcery and Cecilia and its sequels?
    If yes, do you know where a European (Dutchwoman, to be precise) could buy them, or which publisher I should approach with this question?

    I’ve just been given an e-reader, and am now trying to re-buy all my favourites as e-books as fast as my purse will permit.
    Kobobooks appears to be the e-bookstore of choice for several large publishing houses, (among them Penguin and DAW, HarperCollins and Scholastic) to sell their epub- or pdf-books to European buyers, and I’ve found your Lyra books there, as well as The 7 towers, Thirteenth child and Snow white and Rose red.
    But the Enchanted forest books, as well as the Sorcery and Cecilia books, aren’t available there.

    I googled ‘Dealing with Dragons ebook’ and found a lot of places that appear to offer downloads, e.g. epubbud, and store.payloadz – com, but I wasn’t sure these are legal stores that pay you. I will not buy from pirates, but some of these sites looked like real shops, so I’m getting confused.
    Looking for ‘Sorcery and Cecilia ebook’ also netted a lot of download sites, but most of those were more clearly illegal torrents: the one that looked as if it might be legal was filestube – com: is that a legal outlet for your books, or is it a pirate too?
    It might be worthwhile to get your agent onto this, get her to warn the publishers to send them cease-and-desist orders or whatever they are called.

    Also, if you know or can easily find out which e-stores sell your ebooks legally, you might consider naming them, or linking to them, on your Books-pages on your website.
    That way, anyone who finds your website, wants to buy your e-books and wants to make sure the income goes to the right person will be steered in the right direction.

    For paper books, I understand not wanting to privilege one shop above another, and so naming none. Besides, any bricks-and-mortar store can order in your paper books for their customers, from all over the world.

    But for ebooks, the stores (and the publishers) seem to be intent on setting up a monopolist structuring of the ebook-market. There are only a few legal e-book stores that the publishers deal with, and each store seems limited to one or a very few formats, and customers are limited to the store in their region. This means that the list of legal places where people can buy your ebooks is probably short enough that it’s possible to name them on the books’ pages, without slighting anyone.

    Sorry to bother you with this, I know it should be mailed to your agent or publisher, but I can’t find out where to send it to.
    I’m just a reader who enjoys your books, not a writer, so I don’t know my way around this whole writer’s business world.
    If you want to ‘moderate’ it off this thread, please do so: I named the pirates as a warning to your loyal readers and fans, but if you think they might go there and buy from them you wouldn’t want the names in a public forum.
    Maybe you could mail it on to your agent to look into?

    • Tiana – If I’m going to criticize a book for having craft problems, I almost never name it without the author’s excpress permission, and in fact I do what I can to disguise them (the actual subplots in the one I described involved action, romance, etc. but I changed the details), because when the book is out in print, it’s too late for the author to do anything to change it.

      Jane – Yeah, we’re called “writers.” Gong back and forth is one of many and several types of process, and as long as it ends up with words getting written, it’s nothing to worry about. Complain, sure – I think every writer I know, whatever their process, is convinced that if they only look hard enough, they can find an easier way to do things than whatever they’re stuck with.

      Hanneke – Neither the Enchanted Forest books nor the Kate and Cecy books currently have any legal ebooks available. There are, however a set of fantastic audiobooks from Random House/Listening Library that I’m pretty sure are available for legal downloading (they cast all the voices, so it’s like listening to a radio play!). There’s currently a court case over books with older contracts that don’t mention electronic rights; once it’s settled, we’ll know more about what we can and cannot do. All my other books either had the rights reverted, so we could do our own ebooks (the Lyra books), or were reverted and resold with new contracts that do include electronic rights, or the publisher came back with an addendum to the contract for electronic rights, so they’re all available from Amazon, B&N, Itunes, and other obvious legal websites..

      I’ll pass the names on to my agent, but really, dealing with pirated copies is like playing whack-a-mole – you smack one down and another one pops right up somewhere else.

  5. Thank you. I’ll wait for these until the case and your contracts are resolved and they become legally available.
    Your agent can just search on your name and/or words in the book titles in combination with ‘ebook’, and those moles pop up. The ones I named looked the most like legal bookstores, so I’d consider them the most dangerous – people who wouldn’t use bittorrents might easily buy there, thinking it was an ordinary ebookstore.
    Putting up a notice on your Cecy & Kate and Enchanted Forest book-pages might still be sensible, on the lines of ‘We’re working on the ebookrights for these books. No legal ebooks are available as yet, but as soon as they are I’ll post it here. Please be patient and don’t send my income to the pirates.’. It could warn off some honest fans from false shopsites.

  6. It sounds like it would be beneficial to establish timelines for each of the characters or factions in a story so no one has any implausible downtime.