Write Great Subplots

1. Getting Started: Hi everyone. My name is Barbara events and welcome to this course about how to write great subplots or as I like to think of them, narrative threads in your stories. How to weave numerous plots into our stories so that their intricate and intertwined is one of the most common questions that I have had over the years. Subplots or that thing that very often we know we need no writing we know will make it rich, but we're not exactly sure how to put them in and make them realistic and make them germane to what we're writing. We very often know what that means. Central plot story is we have an idea of that, but that's one plot. And the story is that we often fall in love with, have numerous layers that seem to come together at some points and diverged at some points tend to cause conflict with one another at times and then worked in harmony together in a way that we can't even necessarily extract these various plot threads. They're all one wonderful big story together. And that is the aim. One challenge is, and what often riders run into is that they come up with that primary first narrative. But then they sort of TAC there, subplot there narrative threads on top of that. In a way that these smaller stories tend to sit on top of the main story rather than being integral to it. It's almost as though we could lift them right out and our steroid would stay the same. This is exactly the sort of thing we want to avoid to that end. This class is designed to help you determine what would make a good subplot in my story. How do I figure out what these sort of sub stories, these additional narrative threads are? Then how do I waive those narrative threads into my main story? We will look at this from a variety of angles. We will be addressing what a narrative thread actually is. Why it's important to use those narrative threads. And it's important for us to take a moment and look at that. Because you would be amazed actually at the power horse, the workhorse that additional plot threads can serve in your stories. We will also look at the various types of narrative threads. You can have characters. How do you choose which characters should have those narrative threads? Point of view, and how point of view can affect the narrative threads you choose to include. We will look at how you actually go about choosing those threads. How you plot those threads out in your stories, how you weave those additional threads into the main, main, primary story thread in your novels, screenplays, creative nonfiction, etc. Then some advice on how you go about organizing all of this. How you keep all of these threads and plot structures going on in a manageable way. I hope that sounds of interest. If it does, I will see you in the next video. 2. How Plots & Subplots Work Together: Alright, first things first, if you have not, take a moment, go over and download the class notes and the class worksheet for this course. These nodes are going to be wonderful for you to follow along and make your own notes on. You will absolutely learn and retain things, watching and listening to this class. But you will retain and learn so much more if you follow along with notes and add your own observations and the things that matter most to you on top of that. So take a moment. If you've not downloaded that, run over, download that, and then come back and join us for the rest of the course. Another note, this course, while it deals with specifically subplots, we're not going to get into all the nuances of how you plot something out in terms of the grand narrative of your story or in terms of scenes. I have all kinds of courses that get into additional detail on plotting. So if you watch this and you wish you had a bit more information on how to actually go about plotting your stories. I have you covered and these are included in your course notes, so they're listed there. But my plot, one-on-one course will help you design the grand narrative of your story. My great scenes mega course is going to address all the ins and outs of scenes development. That's a lengthy course, but it not only addresses everything you need to really make a good solid tight seen in your stories. It also addresses many of the questions that I've had over the years when it comes to scene writing. Another course that's going to help you is the course on creating a scene outline. That outline courses a little bit of a broader course than the mega cores. It gets into less specifics, but it's very proactive. And that's one that basically we will work right through. We will work right through a scene outline and help you get that going and putting those things into practice in your stories right away. So those are three wonderful resources for you. If you'd like more information on plotting. Having said that, I would just like to add what I do in most of my courses, which is that guidelines, not rules. Everything that you hear people give you advice on for writing. It's not a rule, it's a guideline. And there is most definitely some piece of literature out there that is wonderful, but completely flies in the face of the rule that you were given. So what I say here on any of my classes, these are best practices, but it's up to you to decide what really is pertinent for you and for the kind of writing that you want to do. So please do keep that in mind. Now then let's begin and again, please forgive me if I look down. I do teach from notes. Let's talk about what a subplot is. Now you will hear me probably throughout this course, use the term subplot. I'm going to try to stick to narrative threads and I will get into why in a little while here. But basically, every novel in its basic terms has a central story, has a primary plot. And that plot is essentially a sequence of events that are connected by a series of just cause effect, cause, effect. Those series of cause and effect create. What is the primary plot? And that primary plot is generally composed of three things. There's the external conflict. So for example, a princess is stripped of her royalty and she has to fight a dragon and overcome evil forces to take back her crown and save her kingdom. That's this external conflict that's happening. So that's part of your plot. Very often the external conflict is coal-based. The character wants something and it's striving for it so that external conflict is based on a want or a need of the character who's going after this. This is much more the case for genre fiction. If you're writing literary fiction and obvious character goal is not necessarily there, but they're generally is something that the character more or less wants, whether it's this very clear cut mission or not. Second component that we often have in a plot, it's just relationships. There's usually one main one. There can be several, but these relationships are the emotional stakes in a story. So while the character has this external goal or external conflict that she is dealing with, she also has people in her life. This can be friendships, these can be family, that can be romance, but their relationships with people in her life that matter to her. And these relationships are affected By the conflict that's happening around her. This connection of the relationships to the conflict can happen for a variety of reasons. It can happen because the relationship itself is creating the conflict. It can happen because the outcome of a relationship, what we want a certain relationship to be, depends on the outcome of the external conflict. So if my external conflict is that I'm trying to get this wonderful sales job in New York City. And my primary relationship is with a girl who I really want to marry. A young man really want to marry this girl. But I can't afford to really propose to her unless I've got a great job, then that relationship of the young man to the girl he'd like to marry is very much dependent on his ability to get a job in New York City. So you see how in that case, the relationship is dependent on the outcome of the conflict. Another way that relationships can be affected by or pertain to the external conflict in your story is that the external conflict created the relationships. So say our princess who was on her way to get her crown back meets. I had some dashing young man in pursuit of her crown. Now we have this meaningful romance that is budding, that was created because of the conflict of losing her crown in the first place. When you consider these relationships, you always want to think that the protagonist has some sort of goal for the relationship. Just some water that they want to get out of that relationship. And it can be very subtle and simple as I want this relationship to work, I want to maintain good terms with my mother's something. When you think about your relationships, you have some sort of goal for all of them. Mostly, I'd like them to work out. But sometimes for with your boss, for example, you want your boss to, you want your relationship with your boss to work for you, defining what that looks like. Is it your boss is proud of the work you are doing and likes you personally. Or you have your significant other and you want them to love you and you want them to feel very affirmed by you, your relationship with your children. You want again, you want that relationship to work, but in that case, you want those children to very much feel like they can come and talk with you if they need to. So the specifics of how we think about that relationship working and in that way, our goal for the relationship can be different. So you want to kind of get into the nuances of that. When you drill down to that level, it will help you write your story. The third piece of this main plot, and we have to talk about the main plots so that we can then understand these subs threads. We have that main plot, it has its external conflict, it has a relationship aspect to it. The third aspect of a primary plot is the internal conflict. Or characters have lies that they believe things that aren't true. It's just as true for a character in fiction as it is for us. We all have lives we believe, and we tell ourselves and then not true. And sometimes we know they're not true, but it's just a hang-up and we continue with it anyway. A lie that we believe can be something like saying, I'm not worthy to carry this ring to Mordor and throw it in. I'm just a habit. That's just a lie that Frodo tells himself. He just doesn't believe he can do it, but he's wrong. He can do it. So that's a simple example of a lie that we believe. So internally, while the character is externally battling something, there is also in the story and internal need that, that character needs to get over. So those are the three general components of what we think of as a primary plot. Now, a subplot or a smaller narrative thread within that, has somewhat the same general idea to it. It generally has those same three components. It's just that they are given to the reader. They are written into the story in a smaller scale with less detail. In certain instances where you're writing a lot of parallel stories, there can be cases in which you have multiple narrative threads that are all more or less equal in weight. But that is a very specific kind of writing. More often than not, you will have one primary narrative or the other narrative threads will then weave into that. Now those narrative threads, as we will see, when you do them, right, they don't sit on top of that primary thread. They are a part of it and the primary thread needs them and relies on them and they aren't it. So we will look at that. But by and large, these sort of sub narrative threads are smaller versions of what we have just discussed. But that being said, I truly don't like to look at these in terms of subplots. It implies that these smaller threads you are riding are not as important as the main plot. If you look at them that way, then they will not be as important as your main plot because you simply will not take care to write them into the story with the same kind of importance. This is one of the largest mistakes I see characters make in their writing. They try to start writing a, what they consider a subplot. It sits on the top of the narrative. It doesn't really impact that primary narrative. It's sort of just goes off and it's there at times. It often doesn't come to its own satisfying cohesion. And then it's there in the story for a little while and it's gone. And then it re-emerges again. And we are sort of surprised to see it and I forgot about that. So when we think of it as a subplot, we tend not to do it justice. But if we think of our stories as a big rope with many strands, yes, there's one thicker primary piece of that rope. But to make the good, wonderful, solid media piece of rope, it has all these strands woven together and that's what makes the rope. And they all depend on each other for that rope to be solid and to hold us up. That is why I prefer to think of these as narrative threads. They matter, they all matter. Even if the seemingly smaller thread it must contribute to that main plot and therefore is essential. Don't worry about trying to say to myself, is that a subplot? Is that not a subplot? And try to hammer down a whole definition. That's not the point. What you really want, what you're really going for is one very complex plot. You're going for a plot that has a lot of facets to it. It's like, rather than having an emerald cut stone that has a few clean sides, you have a diamond cut stone. It has a lot more facets to it. And because of that, it reflects things and all these colors go through it. And it's very interesting to look at. We're trying to create a single solid story that has all these nuances to it and where we can see all these wonderful stories in-and-out of it. That's what we are working for. That's why I prefer to think of these as narrative threads. 3. Attributes & Purposes of Subplots: What then is a smaller narrative thread? What does that look like? What makes something a smaller narrative thread? Several things and again, these are on your notes, I recommend following along. They are connected to the primary plot, but they do not supersede it. You will, you do still want to have a clear primary plot that the reader is following. So you will have this smallest story threads, but they're not overshadowing that main story. It can get confusing. Again, there's a way when if you've designed it and you said, Well, I want my story to buy structure by nature. Be juxtaposing, say these two characters throughout, they're both equal. That's something you're deciding in the beginning of your story. What can happen is if you're really starting to write, you have one primary plot and then you fall in love with this secondary story. And I've seen this happen many times. You start writing your primary plot. You have a secondary character, you're trying to give a smaller narrative thread two, then you decide you love your secondary characters so much lets you start building out the secondary plot so much. Then it starts to overshadow the primary plot. Then you try to get back into the primary plot, patch these things two together, they don't, aren't working. You want to own that these subplots, these smaller strands of story do not, will not, cannot supersede my main story. If you love, if you just start to write a secondary story and you're just falling in love with it. That's a clue for you to think about. Maybe this should be its own, its own separate story. And I can have a smaller story within that. I can have small story in this story and then I can take this secondary story that I love it exploited a totally different books, short story, film, etcetera, better way to do it. So traits of a small narrative thread does not supersede the primary plot, its purpose. The purpose of a smaller narrative thread is to enhance and strengthen the main story. If you've watched my other courses, you know, I'm a firm believer that you have to have a good, solid reason for everything that you put into your story. And narrative threads are no different. You have to know why that narrative thread. Now, there can be many reasons why you might put one in and we will look at those. But it can be something like, well, if we don't know about the backstory on this young man who the girls fallen in love with, then we're going to miss something in the main story. So we really need to have this narrative thread of a backstory that one seems obvious to us. It can be something also like, you know, my story is rather grim and I think some comedic relief is needed. That's another reason, that's still a good reasons. There are many reasons you might do this, but you have to know what it is and why it is so important to actually know why you might say to yourself, Well, I'm putting this character in. It's a good story and that's fine. That's why I'm doing it. And you want to know the reason why? Because that will dictate what you put in that plot. Just like when you're plotting something out in your main story, you have to be able to say, I need to include this scene because filling the blank, you have a function, you have a purpose for those scenes. If you don't ascribe, prescribe a function to your scenes, then you can easily end up with fluff. You can end up with too many scenes that tell me the same information as a reader. They might all be great scenes, but I didn't need three of them. I needed one. And because you gave me three instead of one, you have reduced the power of all of them. I need something new that I'm getting from every scene. I need something new that I'm getting from every one of your narrative threads. And that is why you have to know why it's there. Because if I know that I'm putting this character is narrative thread in. Because I want character B to juxtapose and provide a foil for character a, my protagonist. Then I'm going to be very choosy about the scenes and the story that I wave with character B to specifically pick scenes that caused that juxtaposition. If I didn't know that reason that I might end up including this funny, lighthearted, silly story about character B. But it didn't really addressed the foil. That was my goal and that's how you say, how do I know if I'm plotting the right plots and my narrative thread? Well, I have this funny little story about this foil. Yes, but what does that? It might be funny, it might be great. But you design this character for a foil. And so when you start to kind of go off of that goal too much, I start to get lost. It starts to be too much. And that's where you get the story bloat, that happens. And where your threads no longer seem cohesive. Subplots, narrative thread, sub narrative threads connected to the primary plot, but they don't oversee it, they don't over Shadow IT. They have a purpose and that purpose is to strengthen. Enhance that main plot. You have to know your purpose. Third, subplots have the ability to divert outside of the primary plot and describe things that are not necessarily a part of it. So it's a way for us to get a broader vision of the story as a whole. So that's another characteristic of some subplots. They still have a character with a story goal who has setbacks and conflict. Now again, as we said earlier, story goal can be more subtle. It can be more overt, but you still have a character, that character still has something he or she wants and she is still going to face setbacks and conflict. So it's, it's the same plot elements. It's still a plot. It's distance, smaller narrative thread. So you want to make sure that it's there. And finally, it does reach a resolution of some kind. Those you don't want to start these a sub threads, these subplots, and then not finished them. That's very unfulfilling. So you want to avoid that. So those are all traits that are common to smaller narrative threads in your stories. In practical terms, this means that you don't have to build this complex plot for each one of your characters, or each one of your supporting characters are your villain, etc. But you do need to have some just three primary things. These three steps, you want to say start with a character who's going to be a part of that subplot. You're going to say, what's their goal? What's their struggled to achieve that goal? And then what's the resolution? And the resolution could be that they attain the goal. They don't attain the goal, or it's a draw and it's nothing. It's just kinda math is even, but some, some kind of closure. So those are going to be the three aspects. So just as it's got external conflict, internal conflict, and relationships where we talked about the main story. Having, structurally, this smaller narrative thread is going to have a character with a goal who deals with conflict and setbacks in an effort to achieve that goal. Resolution. Basic to that kind of subplot. Great example of this is Lord of the Rings, where the primary character, Frodo's goal is to get that ring to Mordor. But there are so many additional characters in that story who are each dealing with goals or romances that they have, or internal struggles they're fighting with. Am I right to be king or is this the romance going to work, etc. Lots of characters dealing with things in that story. But all of those sides stories are affecting and working toward Frodo's main goal of getting the ring into Mordor. That's just a brief example. But now that we've defined, okay, what, what is this narrative thread, it, at its core supposed to be? Let's look a moment. Why do we include these? 4. Using Subplots to Enhance a Story: Part One: As we mentioned, story threads need to be crafted and woven with great intention. Otherwise, they sit on top of the story, but they don't actually affect it in a meaningful way. Ultimately, the goal of all of these plots strands is to deepen the reader's interests in the character and the story, the main character in the main story. Now there are specific ways that it can do this. So we're going to run through a lot of examples of why you might use these subplots. But when we do this, this list of the why we might create a subplot. You can then take and use and work through to brainstorm ways and reasons you might include a subplot. So this list that we're about to go through is a wonderful brainstorm list for you. And you'll see that on the class worksheet. There are many reasons you might include a subplot. So I don't want to say that this list is exhaustive, but it will help you to get your creative juices going in terms of thinking of the ways and the kinds of subplots that you might include and how they might enhance your story. So let's begin. First and foremost, subplots increase your stories complexity. If you only write your main story, then you have a rather flat story. We can only get to know your characters so much because we're seeing them from just one level. We're seeing them straight on or this, or that you're giving me one perspective of them. And it's less nuanced when you include multiple stories and multiple ways for me to consider the main story, which is what a subplot can do, then you have made a richer, more in-depth story. So simply by existing, they bring a realism to your story because life is often not so simple. And we have numerous people in our lives that affect things in loads of different ways. This is also true of your narratives. And so subplots one of the ways that they can make things so realistic is that they, they disrupt the flow of the primary plot. We have this primary plot, but we're going to go off here and explore this subplot little bit. Then we're gonna go off here and explore that subplot little bit. Why that's helpful is because when you think about your own life, you know, it doesn't necessarily move forward. In one free flowing thing. We are distracted, we have different things happen where we have to do. We're in the middle of a project, but now we have to stop because the telephone rings and then there's this other thing that I have to go do what I'm supposed to be at that place at seven and then I didn't expect it, but now there's this other person I have to deal with. That's what life is like. So bringing that kind of complexity into your subplot makes things feel more realistic. It also lets me see a variety of perspectives on that primary story. So that makes it less black and white. You have Nuance if I only have one story. And I'm saying to myself on my story is of this princess who lost her crown and now she's fighting to get it back. And her uncle is in power in the castle. Well, uncles, bad, princesses, good. We're done. But when we introduce a subplot, and that subplot is this backstory on the uncle about how he battled something and he fought for the crown and he looked over his niece while she was very, very young and she wasn't behaving as well as he thought. So he didn't think that she really was right for the crowd at this point. Well, now we're all Nuance. Now we're like, I don't know, maybe maybe she's ready but he doesn't think she's reading anymore and he really has a right to feel the way that he feels. And we know now, now it's more complex. So it's that kind of thing. We're getting all of these different facets to it that make it less easy for the reader to just say black and white, good and bad. Not that a story is bad for doing that. But when you think about a story, we can think about going to a film or what have you and then you talk about it with your friends. The story is where you can talk for quite some time and really have differing opinions and say, well, I don't know that I agree with that because if you remember, there was that scene where he said such and such. And so I think this and there's all that nuance to it. That's because those stories gave you many facets. It was rich, it was meaty, and that's what subplots do. They give us things and let me far more shades of gray. So you have a variety of characters, you have a variety of plots. Not only is that going to make your main plot more interesting, the reader is just going to be more interested in general. There's more going on. So it's this wonderful way that it reaches enriches your story. These myriad of narrative threads allow you to pivot your story, take twists and turns you might not otherwise take or be able to take. Now keep in mind and this is important. Most of your numerous now narrative threads, they're not resolved in one scene. They go on and on. They, they proceed through your story. So as you'll see when we set this up, It's not something that you have once, it's something you start. And then we revisited, and we revisited and we revisited again. That's why the weaving of these plots is so important. So there are around, they're hanging around for a while, keeping things very interesting. Another reason that subplots are so important and valuable is that they help you flush your story out with substance rather than fluff. What I mean by that, again, it goes back to something I was saying earlier when you're designing your story, if you design strategic subplots, all of which connect back to and relate to and further enhance that primary story. Then they're necessary there, they matter. We need them to have the good, full, rich depth of that main story. So that means that everything you're writing has great significance. Otherwise, you might end up writing these sort of episodic things that don't necessarily seem to be there. And oftentimes the readers will go, Yeah, that was at throwaway chapter. Most of us have read some kind of book or seen a film or something like that where we think to ourselves, What was that weird plot thing over there with that character? Because we totally didn't need that and it added nothing to the story. We've all seen something like that. That's because it wasn't, it wasn't woven into the plot. It wasn't there, flushing out with substance. And you really have to think about this too. Because when you think about stories, your story many times could be resolved quite quickly if all you are doing writing your main story, right? All I'm doing is writing my story about the princess who is kicked out of the castle and she's trying to get back in and get her crown back. If that's at all I'm writing I could probably do that in ten to 20 pages and we're done. So that a novel does not make. What's going to make something like the is that you start throwing in these other characters with their stories. Then we've got to flesh this out and flush that out. You know, that's what makes it into something fall and rich. Go through, take your favorite stories and say if I asked all of this and I just had the primary plot go and have a five-minute short. So these, these subplots fill your story out. They end, but again, it's because they're part of that main narratives. So they've, they've flesh your story out with purposeful things. Another thing that a subplot does is it increases tension. Subplots keep your narrative tension high. They keep it up. If you've watched my courses, I'm plotting, you know that stories are all about tension and then release. We create tension in the reader. What's going to happen next? And then we really sit a little bit. You don't want your readers always up here trying to wonder what's going to happen next. You don't want your readers like, Oh, we're good, nothing much happening here. You want this emotional roller coaster that you want to take them on in, sometimes a big dip and sometimes it's a little hill. That's the goal with the tension and the release. But if all my attention and releases happening with my main story, that can be exhaustive. So if I'm at a little bit with my main story, where else can I create this tension? And bringing in these subplots creates new tension that I wouldn't necessarily have had. And when you think about it, when something's black and white, it's easy to make a decision when something's gray in our own lives, right? What do we do? We're more tense about it. What do I do? I don't know what I should do. Very often. If we know what we should do, where are they going to do it or we're going to just say, Yeah, I know I showed, but I'm not going to but when we're not sure what to do, that's when we're like, Oh, no, keep that in mind. These subplots allow for new kinds of tension and more tension and tension in different areas. And they allow us to feel tension and release in different ways. If I've been following Frodo on his journey for the running, and it's been very Tencent, has been all this battle. And I need release. I need release until we get some relief. We get some relief and he goes to visit the elves. And there's this breathing COVID. Well, I still want the reader to go what's happening next? What's happening next? So what do we do? We take that scene and we bring in different kinds of tension. We bring in attention of romance of these other two characters, not a Frodo, these other two characters, let's bring in some tension over here. And let's have Gandalf say some things and there's some little bits of tension over here. Not all the same levels of tension, but different bits of tension happening. So that even while I've been released and whatnot for my main character Frodo, I've got these other bits coming up and what's that? What's that mean? It's shiny object syndrome. We'll open it up with that is same ideas. These subplots keep us, keep us flirt, keep us going. Another thing that they do is they help us develop our characters. And they do this in numerous ways. They can separate narrative threads, can enhance and help us know more about the main character, the protagonist. Because we're seeing that protagonist is viewed from other characters. We're seeing how that protagonist relates to other characters. I have my one view of my princess, but now if I have this relationship with her sister that's happening, I'm going to get more sense of the protagonists I would have had if that relationship with her sister were not there. So when I develop these additional stories, additional relationships, stories with characters, with my protagonist, I'm learning more about her flaws, about her strengths. I'm learning about her goals. And keep in mind that these relationships, can they provide the reader with clues, with information? For example, if I see a man treating his wife badly because they've had a small argument. Then that's telling me something as a reader. If I see him behaving that way and my protagonist is having a fight with his wife and he's not treated very well. That says something to me about his mental state at that point. It indicates to me how he might handle difficulties with other relationships. I make judgments about him as a reader and that's seen that relationship with his wife or the odd colors. My expectations for that character going forward, just like we have expectations of people in our own lives. If we have someone in your life who constantly says yes, i'll, I'll come to that and then flakes out at the last minute, we have expectations of that person that they're going to flake out on us. Same is true with our characters. So you are giving me information about the protagonist, but you're also setting up my expectations of how that protagonist will behave in the story based on that behavior. Just like with strengths, if I see someone in the early stages of the story doing the honorable thing and behaving upright than my expectations for him as I go through the story are going to be that he's going to be honorable and upright. So if at a moment in the story he then isn't. I'm like What just happened? If he was dishonorable in the beginning, I would have been like, yeah, pretty much what I expected. But he was honorable. It wouldn't be That's what these additional threads do. They give me that information, but they're totally germane to the plot. But as you can see two Also my reader, the experience of that story. So subplots communicate how our character has grown. We see progression of a character over the story because of those subplots. Likewise, these narrative threads also provide us with much more information about secondary characters. So we get to know more people than just our protagonist. Those secondary characters helped me have new perceptions of the protagonist. But those secondary characters also, let me have a better understanding of the story as a whole. They brought in my whole world out as the reader. 5. Using Subplots to Enhance a Story: Part Two: Another reason that we include subplots in the story is because they regulate the pace of the story. As we were talking about earlier. You don't want to take your characters on this intense roller coaster ride through the whole story. So if the intense story of Lord of the Rings is Frodo getting that ring into Mordor. We need breaks from that, we need burritos from that. And having smaller tensions happening with these other narrative threads allows you to slow the main train down a little bit so that that's an arresting place while it's still advancing the story forward in these other ways. So in that way, we always feel like we're moving forward. We're also given room to breathe and consider and to have a space from the stress of the main story. Alternately, those subplots pushed that main story forward. You can use these subplots as a time to help the character develop a skill or attain something that he needs for the main to continue on his journey. You might have that princess and her main journey fighters to get back and get her crown back. But there's this subplot she has to go on because she has to go and visit this wise man who has this magical stone that she needs to the chicken get some revelation from the stone that's going to help her defeat her uncle and get her crown back. Well now we have this little side story, okay, sided venture side plot that's run off and get this magic stone. That's just, that's a narrative thread side plot. It's giving me something that I need for her to go on her main journey. It's sort of like a Star Wars. Luke Skywalker's main goal is to save the princess and all of that. But he's got to go learn the force. He has to go Stop. Stop your main goal. Take a pause. Go over with Yoda here, get some training. Same idea. It pushes the story forward, but that's all pushing it forward. So it's a time when you can test your character, test their motivations, give them different things to do besides just, alright, I'm just gonna keep going until I'm back in my palace. They have to go do these other things. Subplot. Also, they vary your mood and your tone, which is so important and destroy mood and tone are essential to a wonderful story. But you can use these subplots to give me some perspective and lighten things up. If you have a very dark story, you can have a more lighthearted or humorous character who comes in and it's sort of, it's sort of brings me some levity to it. You know, or if you're having something that's more light, pull in some seriousness. There's a wonderful, wonderful ghost story film called The uninvited. And if you were to just focus in on the ghost story aspect of it, It's a classic film, highly recommended up, it's enjoyable. But if you were to just focusing on the ghost part of it, that's dork. It's a dark story. But there's this whole other plot side of this brother and sister who buy a house and he falls in love with a girl. So there's a romance in it, and It's got numerous subplots. It's got the girl who is in love with and she has a relationship with her grandfather. And which you see in that story, is there a lot of lighter plots happening in what is a primarily a ghost story slash mystery. I will include this in my resources so that you can go and watch it stream and watch it. It's so very good. So but, but that's a way that you do that. It's a serious story. They've liked it up with lots of, lots of subplots and things like that. Subplots also help you develop themes for your stories. So, you know, when you have one primary story, It's harder to flesh out of a theme because it's the main thing in the story. When you have a myriad of subplots, that's when you start to get themes happening. If you think of the film Casablanca, if you have ever seen it. You have this kind of main mission of one of the characters, which is to get out of Casablanca. And what you see through a lot of sub stories, that movie has so many little sub threads in it is that there's a theme of people trying to get out of Casablanca. That's one of the themes of the story is let me get out of here. In that story. One of the main plot is a romance between a man and a woman who ended up getting separated. But if you watch the story, what you see are different themes of people in love and what love looks like and what you do for someone you love. That's a theme in it, but you can't develop that theme if you only have the one main story, because that's all you've got it. Now it's just a part of the main story. Once I see it coming up in different ways and different facets of it through these other stories. Now I know it's a theme. Another thing that subplots can do is actually. Support or challenge a moral perspective that you have when you as an author, write a story, you are writing from a vantage point of your values or the chosen values of the author as it were. So for example, if I'm writing my story about my nice princess who was kicked out of her castle and lost her crown and has to get it back. When my story ends, if she gets her crown back and her evil uncle gets his comeuppance, what I'm saying is, good wins over evil. Good conquers evil. And I'm saying in my story, it's not right for someone to steal a young person's crown. I might be saying in my story, it's not right to condemn someone without a trial. They're all, you're just saying that by the perspective of a To Kill a Mockingbird, harbor leaders necessarily say this is wrong, this is racist. I don't think that this should be done in this trial is not fair, etc. We see that come out through those various sub stories. We understand that she thinks that the trial against this man is wrong, that this man is being treated badly because people are racist. We understand those values of the author because of the way that she has written the story. So when you have plot threads, you can address a moral issue from a variety of angles. If you only have your main plot thread, then you've got that authorial perspective, believe and you move forward with that. But if I have a character who thinks one thing about justice, now I have a character thinks something else about justice. I can juxtapose those things and it makes the reader have to think about, well, gee, what do, what do I think about justice? I might have someone who's very, very legalistic about it and says, No, these are the rules that we follow these, then you might have someone else who's a bit more like a case-by-case basis. You can't just go by the rules. You need to listen to people and understand this and whatnot. And then you might have somebody else Who's a little too forgiving and he's just like, Oh, it's okay, we'll let that pass. And you might have somebody who's just very condemning and not forgiving it all. And you might have somebody who just totally Florence the law altogether. You have these various facets of how we look at the idea of the moral idea of justice. So that's a way for you to explore moral issues and give this meaty depth to your story. Narrative threads also serve the magnificent function of backstory when you want to incorporate backstory and that is a subplot. But think of how you could do this. You could, in your novel, just sort of stop the action and then fill in the backstory. Because I have this novel about this princess. And we could say, pause. There's this whole backstory about her relationship with her uncle that we haven't told you about. And little did you know and plural. Oh, when are we gonna go on about pages we've totally pause the action, exposition, backstory. Or we have this subplot. And we have this subplot because she has this relationship with his handsome young man that she met. And through their conversations, she's alluded to certain things about her relationship with her uncle, but she hasn't really told him everything. And now he's trying to piece together what this backstory is and he's trying to figure it out. So now we have a subplot of this handsome young man trying to figure out the mystery, a mystery to him behind it, what is the relationship with this princess and her uncle exactly again, and he's trying to figure that out. Well, now you've turned it into a mystery and you've made it a subplot, and you've made it far more interesting. You've made an action-oriented because now I have to go through and figure this out with him rather than stopping the Australian pumping in a bunch of exposition. So it's a much more intriguing way to meet out your backstory throughout your main plot. And finally, something that these narrative threads do is they can solve gaps or issues with your main plots. So if you're riding along and you're like, You know what, I need to flush this bit out or I've written something and I'm not sure that it quite makes sense. I will go in and sort of have this additional story. However short or long, go in, flesh that out. And that's going to solve this sort of gap. And my main story that I have right there, It's just a very happy list of reasons that we include subplots or these narrative threads. Now again, as I said, for you practically speaking, take this list and when you have your main story idea, just use this as a brainstorm thing. We'll get into this toward the end of the class, but go through this list and just say, you know, what are some moral perspectives that I might like what I've put up with backstory. Am I going to have to have in this and how am I, how am I make that out? You know, or, or what are the themes that I'm looking to do here and let me list out my characters. You're brainstorming all of these things and use this as a checklist if you're already writing and you have subplots, take a moment and run your subplot through this list. Does it do at least one of these things, but doesn't do it this one of these things you'll probably have surface subplot and you need to go in and fix that or get rid of it. Alright, in the next video, now that we've looked at the reasons why we would use subplots or smaller narrative threads. Let's look at some of the types of smaller narrative threads we might employ. 6. Types of Subplots: There are many different kinds of plots. And so there are many different kinds of smaller plot threads we might have in our stories. What I'd like to do is just run through some of these with the hopes that they will help generate ideas for you of ways that you can include these in your stories. The first one I want to talk about is what's called a mirror plot. And in this case, what you basically have is you have your main narrative plot, but then you have a smaller narrative thread that more or less kind of mirrors it follows along and pattern and concept to the main plot, but it has enough of a difference. We are able to do some comparative. For example, say you have a main character who has fallen in love with the boy and it's working out fabulously. The relationship is so great. And then she has a secondary character, best friend. And her best friend also fell in love. And that's not working out so well. That's a mirror plot. Each character has fallen in love with a boy. One, it's working out fabulous. The other it is not working out so fabulous. These mirror each other. What's the value of that? It allows the reader to make certain judgments and perceive certain things they could not perceive. If I drew a stick figure for you on a piece of paper. And I would say, tell me about this person. You wouldn't be able to tell me very much. If I drew a second stick figure next to that stick figure, and I put glasses on the second stick figure. And then I would say, Now you tell me, tell you about this first stick figure. You would say, Well, he's got good vision, or at least better vision than that character, right? You know something more about the first character because I gave you something to compare him to. Same idea. I might read a relationship and say, I don't think that's a brilliant relationship. But then you put a mirror relationship into it. That's like five times worse. Now I'm looking at the main relationship, but it's not so bad because, you know, it's, it's better, comparatively speaking. So you're giving me different angles and different facets and that's what a mirror, a mirror thing does. It helps illuminate conflict. It helps me perceive things in different ways. Another example of this could be a girl who just, she really wants to get into university. She's rejected by every single school except one. And the school that did take her is the one that she wants to go to the least. And then you can have a secondary character who didn't expect to get into her first pick school, but she totally did. And she got in with a scholarship. Do you see how that creates tension? Do you see how if your best friend got into this school she didn't think she would get into and got a really great scholarship for it. You thought you were gonna get into all these schools. You got into None of them. You got into this one school that you weren't excited about and you didn't get a scholarship. There's just some tension there. Makes it more interesting. Another kind of story thread which sort of follows along, we just said, is a contrast story thread. And that's one in which the secondary character faces similar circumstances, similar problems to the main character. But that's secondary character makes different decisions. What's different about this? And what I just said is the other one is more situational things happening to them. Contrast, we're really seeing them make different decisions. So say you have two siblings, they're twins and they're both growing up and they're both struggling with stress and anxiety as adults, as young men. And one young man decides to turn to alcohol to get over his problems. And so he ends up with an alcohol dependency and he's sort of going downhill. The other young man was likewise compelled to do that, but decided instead, he was going to channel this energy. And he was going to volunteer at a soup kitchen every day. And in doing that, he realized so much about his life that he didn't denote a greater appreciation for it type thing. There's a contrast. They made different choices. So their circumstances were seemingly the same, But when the rubber hits the road and they came to making a decision about what to do. That's where their plots diverged. So the secondary characters sort of contrasting thread shows what the primary characters outcome could have been if he had made that choice, if that makes sense. Another way that we can use these narrative threads. It's just complications where we have a secondary character who makes matters worse for the primary character. That's a plot thread. So subplots complicate things. They make things more complicated for your main characters. And that's all great way to keep your readers going. You know, we have these different plots going and it just helps. We still have the main goal, but now we have these little complications and sort of throw rug monkey wrench into things and make it harder for me to achieve my goal as the protagonist. Another kind of plot thread that is very common is the romance plot thread. You know, someone's on a mission, they fall in love and that changes things. Romance can add so much tension to a story. And so this is why it's used so much. It, It's a nice kind of tension because. You can have your primary tension, but the romance can be its own kind of almost positive tension in a way. Another, another subplot that often uses just growth. Your character has emotions, your character has difficulties, has struggles, and we want to see the character grow. From that. We want to see that internal change happening throughout the course of the story. So a subplot can help reveal a character's arc. I want to see Frodo get the ring to Mordor, but I also want to see Frodo grow as a hobbit, grow as a person and understand things that he didn't understand before. What makes that valuable? What makes all of these sort of narrative sub threads that he goes on. You know, we see those help develop him as a person. When we see the internal struggles of his dealing with the ring, when we see the relationships that he develops with Gollum and the conflicting emotions he has about Gollum. Those are narrative threads. We're going down. The main thread is Frodo getting that ring to Mordor. But we have this side threat of watching Frodo struggle with the ring and process it and see Gollum and be terrified. You have to imagine how terrified Frodo must have been to seek Gollum and to be deathly afraid of ending up like Gollum. That's its own story, that's its own thread. The totally connects with the main goal of getting that ring to Mordor. Growth in the characters is one of the main things that these, these narrative threads can do. Another way to add an interest with narrative threads are to consider characters, sort of oddities, habits that they have addictions that they have. When you're crafting your characters and you say, well, I'm going to have a character and he's going to be OCD. Think about how can I use this OCD? How am I going to show this OCD? What are these sort of narrative little sort of subplots that I'm going to go on because of this OCD, what are, what are the goals? If you've ever seen the Jack Nicholson movie as good as it gets. The main thing that Jack Nicholson's character wants as Helen Hunt, he loves that woman and he wants her in his life. Because he wants her in his life, but also because he's got this OCD, he ends up on this trip with his person. He didn't really like. He ends up trying to do these different things, dealing with people who didn't want to deal with all of these side things. But we're watching him process through his OCD or watching him deal with that. So when you have characters with these unique side traits, you're going to explore that, going to explore that addiction. You're going to explore those oddities. That is a thread. Another way you can weave a narrative threading is fear. Make your characters vulnerable, make them afraid of things, and then use that fear to build in a narrative thread. You might have a princess who's been kicked out of the palace and she is terrified of water. She's afraid of water. Her parent's drowned. She won't get on a boat. But she has to get on a boat if she's going to go and find that wonderful miraculous stone we were talking about. That's going to tell her what she needs to know to defeat her uncle. Now she has to get on a boat. There's this, this thread, this story thread happening in there that kind of weaves and backstory and keep in mind your threads could easily incorporate multiples of these. It could be a backstory, but also a fear threat. It's kind of both. So keep that in mind but use the fear to make a story more powerful. Another great way to add interest to your stories is to have a couple of your secondary characters be in conflict with one another. Not even conflict with the primary character, but conflict with one another. You see that often in Lord of the Rings, because there are so many characters in that you'll see Gandalf competing with another wizard, or you'll see two men who are on the same side but butting up against one another. So there's just sort of this background conflict happening that creates interest in the story. And again, as we were saying, it's a lesser conflict than the main conflicts. So it allows you to balance this tension release like if you're unreleased, age with the main conflict, push up the tension a little bit. In these secondary areas, it really allows you to play with things. Another subplot you will see is dreams, where you might go off and you might say it sounds I had a dream and we described the dream. And it turns out that the dream reveals to me things about that character that I didn't know. Or maybe the dreams reveal actually important information for the character to achieve his or her goal. But it's a way to pull in some reflection into the story and be a little more up in the character's head. And not just action-oriented cause and effect. Just subplot that show why something is the way that it is. This often happens if you have to take a moment and say, well, say the princess got on the ship even though she was afraid and she got to this island where they suppose that the stone is, and they meet this person who's guarding the stone. And then the person quoting the stone tells a story to them about how the stone ever came to be in the first place. That's sort of a backstory on this stone, but it's also this cause-effect thing like the world is the way it is now because of this, It's a way to again, flesh that story out by working it into the main mission of the story. Another great kind of subset is just some comedic relief, particularly if you have a dark, dark story. What you want to be careful of with the comedic relief and with all of these is, again, it has to connect to the main plot. I specify this with comedic relief because I think it's the easiest one for people to want to just throw in because they feel like they emotionally needed. Even then, even if your reason for being there as comedic relief, you need to make sure it's connected to the plot. So having said all of that, those are all, some, but not all, the kinds of ways that you can incorporate a subplot when you are designing your story. And you're thinking about all of your narrative threads, you're going to want to say, alright, this narrative thread that I'm thinking about, which one of all of these does it feel? Like I said, it might satisfy more than one. But just like we were saying earlier about the reasons you have subplots, helping identify the kind of subplot it is, it's going to help you choose the scenes and the things to show in it. Alright, in the next video, I want us just to go over the kinds of characters who might have narrative threads in your stories, smaller narrative threads so that you have an understanding of who gets one and how much of storage that they have. 7. Choosing Which Characters Need a Subplot: Supporting characters. Most of the complex situations you're going to have in your story are going to arise from your secondary characters when it comes to sort of lesser plot strands or smaller plot strands. So all of those characters, as we've talked about, they have their own goals. They have their own wants, their own desires, their own floors. So any of those, I mean, that makes them ripe for making conflict with them. So look at your minor characters and think about which ones you like and you want to focus on the most. There are three kinds of conflict that mostly emerge when it comes to minor characters. Now can be when you have conflict between a supporting character and the protagonist. It can also be that you have conflict between two supporting characters. And it can also be that you have conflicts between the supporting characters and the antagonizing forces. To go back to Lord of the Rings, for example, Sam, we have sand having conflict with Frodo, especially as that ring starts to take Frodo over. Sounds very protective of Frodo, but at the same time he butts heads with him as that ring starts to take over, Frodo. Sam is also dealing with the antagonizing forces against Frodo, getting that ring into Mordor. So he's dealing with that. Sam also deals with conflict between other people on their team as they're trying to decide what the best course of action is. So Sam deals with all three. You don't necessarily have to have a character that deals with all three, but Sam happens too. So those are the three kinds of conflict that you might manifest in threads for supporting characters. You can also have a second kind of narrative thread where you have a supporting character, but she specifically make that supporting character a point of view character. We'll talk a little bit more about point of view later in this course. But when you elevate a secondary character to a point of view character, In some ways you're making him or her, a kind of minor protagonist were getting in their head. We're seeing through their eyes that automatically makes them more important. That means that you will feel the need as a writer to invest more time in their story, explore their story more, go further with it as a reader, if you give me someone's perspective, you are telling me they're important and I am therefore going to expect you to follow through on additional information about them. When you do this though, do keep in mind they are supporting characters and as we've said, You don't want their thread overshadowing the main story. Another character who you might consider giving a plot through to our chest. Lesser antagonizing forces. You have your main antagonizing force or villain. But you can have lesser antagonizing forces as well. And those might very well manifest themselves into these smaller subplots. Now please keep in mind, subplots can vary in length. Sit, and we'll see this little while here, but some subplots track through almost the whole story. But some subplots are here for a few chapters and then they're over there, fine. It's okay to have a subplot that shorter like that, but you need to bring it to a closure. It still needs to have its arc. It's still needs to end, but it doesn't have to be as long. So you could have a lesser antagonizing force. And, and we just kinda go down that road for awhile. And these forces can be forces that are sort of joined with the main antagonist. But they also might be antagonizing forces that are separate on their own. For example, say Our princess who is trying to get her crown doc. She's fighting against her uncle. Now, we might have this subplot where we go down, where there's this sort of henchmen of her uncle who tries to do something. And so we have to go down this road of her dealing with his henchmen. That's one way to do it. But it also might be that she, in the course of trying to get this back, stops in the home of an old friend. And the old friend out of love for her. He doesn't think she should be doing whatever she thinks she needs to do. He doesn't think she should get on the ship and go look for the stone. So he ties her up to keep it from going. He's doing it out of love. He's totally not sided with the uncle, but he's an antagonizing force because he is stopping us from doing what she needs to do, which is get on the boat and get to the stones that she can get her uncle out of her kingdom. So antagonizing force plot thread their relationship there with this man and his family friend. But antagonizing force just the same. But again, keep in mind when you do this. These are not detours. These are stepping stones. These are, these are this is the way she has to go to get onto the main thing. It's not just a detour. It has to ultimately be part of the main story. Now this is important, say she has a friend, he tied her up. Now we have to go down this road. But she gets untied and she gets on the ship and she gets to the stove. So you say to me, Well Barbara, she got untied and got on the ship and got to the stone. Doesn't that make this whole chapter that we read about the family friend tying her up and detaining her. Isn't that a detour? Because ultimately she got on the ship, when she got to the stone, she got her kingdom back. Not if you write it well, not if in that detour, I see character development happening or I learn important information that needed to happen or maybe because he tied her up. Yes. She got on the ship and she got going. But if she'd been able to get on the ship the day before like she wanted to, she wouldn't have run into that storm that happened at sea. And because the storm happened to see this important map of how to get from the island to this other place, got tossed overboard. So now yes, great. She's gonna get to the island and get this job, but she doesn't have the maps needs anymore. So again, it has to matter. I have to no character development came out of it. I have to know something came out of that. Otherwise it would be a detour. Also the villain, the villain can have a subplot as well. Great example of this is the Bible. You have the story of David. David's the protagonist. He's trying to be king and who is the king? Saul is the king, but Saul has a relationship with his son Jonathan. Jonathan happens to be good friends with David. Jonathan. Thanks. David is right. Soul is angry at Jonathon for being on David side subplot. It's also relationship with his son. So you can still have subplots for your villain as well. Finally, you could have your protagonist have minor goals. Keep in mind your protagonist has his main goal. Get the ring to Mordor, get my pals back, get my kingdom back. But while that's their primary focus, they still can have minor goals. They still can have wants that are outside of that. So consider what those are and weave those into your story as well. In the next video, I want to touch briefly on point of view and how point of view connects to these various plot threads. 8. How Point of View Alters a Subplot: When we're designing a smaller plot thread, that's smaller plot thread can revolve around the protagonist, but it can also revolve around a supporting character. Say, our main plot is about a man trying to make the major leagues in football. He's trying to make a major league football team. Now, protagonist is also trying to raise his daughter. After a divorce. He got the divorce, his wife, he's got custody of the child. So let's plot strand. We'll plot strand. That is, make major leagues. Second thought, strand, raise my daughter as a single father. And let's say that the main plot in this story is seen through the eyes of the protagonist coach. That's a third strand. The main story is about the man trying to make bleak. Another subplot for that protagonist is him trying to raise his daughter. But the point of view, character in the story is the man's coach. So because I'm telling the story about the man, but the point of view is from the point of view of the coach. We've added a third threat to the story. Now, the protagonists go make the major league. His subplot is to support his daughter and help her fit in. Very specific by goal, make the major league. What is my subplot? It's not just have a good relationship with my daughter. It's I need to be able to financially support my daughter. And I know she's having trouble fitting in at school and I want to be there for her emotionally and helper fit in and move on and have friends. The coaches thread. That third threat. It's going to revolve around that man's effort to make the major league, right? Because the coach, he's not there to raise that little girl. He's focused on what do I need to do to get this man to make the Major Leagues? Here's what's key, the protagonist, why does he want to be in the legs? And this goes back to all the character design things I have you go through where it's like a reason you know, why they want to do something. This is why character development is so, so important. If you know your characters you are plotting will be so much more consistent and easy. The protagonist wants to make the major leagues because he wants to make money. And he wants to raise his daughter. He likes football. He likes it, but he doesn't need football. What he thinks is that that's the best shot he has to make the most money to give the daughter the life they want to be the father he wants to be. That's his most important thing, but that's not the coaches goal. The coaches goal. Why does he want this man to make the Major Leagues? Why is he trying to help this man make the major leagues? Because he wants to prove that he's not a has been, he had a career in football. He's been thought of as an old timer, has been. And he doesn't want that. He wants to prove he can still get an up-and-comer into the league. He thinks that well, it just he needs that for him. He'd like the money or what have you that comes with it. So that's his goal. Every viewpoint character that you use in your novel adds another thread to your novel. If you have omniscient and we're in a lot of people's heads. Every single person's head, who you are in is a narrative thread. The main narrative thread of my story, the man trying to make the league. But that narrative thread of the coach, even though he's telling the story of this man trying to make the league is a narrative thread. Another example, if you write a coming of age story about marshes relationship with her mother. And you write that from the young girls point of view. You have a plot. If you also tell it from her mother's point of view, you have to equal plots. There, almost two main plots, right? Or it's a main plot with these two smaller story threads. But it depends on how we look at it. If I only tell that coming-of-age story from the story of the girl, then we're going to get a decidedly different story once I give her mother a perspective as well, I've elevated her mother. Now those stories are more equal. So when we think about how deep, how important, how impactful we want our subplots to be. We need to consider who is a point of view character. I have a whole class on point of view as well. So again, point of view is one of those essential choices you make extremely early on before you've started writing, before you started plotting, so that you plot things properly. Another example of this kind of equality thing is the film Thelma and Louise. You just have two main characters. Each of those main characters, Thelma and Louise, have their own stories and backstories. But they're equal. We're seeing from both of their perspectives. You want to keep that in mind. Let's go back to our story about this young girl and a relationship with her mother. Say we have a coming of age story. It's about a girl named Marsha. Marsha has another, It's really about her relationship with her mother. We've decided that rather than just having it from marshes perspective, it's going to be from Marxist perspective. And we're going to work in her mother's perspective. But let's introduce a third person. Let's add another point of view and say it's her teacher, marshes teacher. And say we only get his point of view for a few chapters. Nonetheless, that's a third story strand and we need to address it as such. But you want to remember, if I bring in marshes teacher to help tell the story of marshes relationship with her mother. That teacher still needs his own goal. Going back to the start of this class, your plot threads, each character has his own goal and it's got to have its own ARQ and its own conclusion. This is so key. In this case, it might be to help Marshall with her spelling tournament. There's a spelling tournament. He really wants Marcia to go on it and be a part of it and he wants to help her with that. That could be his goal, that's fine. But that's his role in the story. Even while the main story is about marshes relationship with her mother. If that teacher did not have a goal, that directly affects the main plot, say her mother doesn't want to do the tournament and that's affecting the relationship. The teacher did not have a goal that affects the main plot, then we don't have a story thread. You might have an interesting character, but you don't have a story thread, which means he is not important enough to give a viewpoint to. Doesn't mean it can't be a character. But if you give him a viewpoint, he needs his own goal in his own plot thread. Now the reverse is not true, okay? Just because the teacher has a goal. So you have a teacher with a goal, that doesn't mean he needs a point of view. But if he has a point of view, he needs a goal. The bottom line here is that every major character in your novel has a goal to pursue, and that goal is related to the main plot. Now some of these goals are more important and interesting than others. Some are worth more of your time than others. This is why you get the glorious decision to make. How much time you invest in your narrative threads at how much time you don't. So some will blend mode to your main plot than others. Well, and that's alright. Let's go back, back to the football story. The coaches goal is to get him in the league. He feels better about himself, right? When you make that supporting role, you need to know why he does what he does. So, as we said, if you make a supporting character with a goal, why is he doing what he's doing? Why is he hoping this man get into the league? You have several choices. You could just blend the coaches story into the main plot. Don't make him a viewpoint character. That's okay. You could just have a limited on, limited third-person where we see mostly out of the eyes of the man trying to make the league. And here's the coach on the side who's trying to help and get in, but the coach has his own reasons for doing that. You can write your story that way. He doesn't need to be a viewpoint character. He might appear in a lot of the scenes, but he's always going to be through the eyes of the protagonist in that situation. You, the writer will know that the coach has certain goals and they don't align with the protagonist's goals. And you can write that into the story in different ways. But it's not coming through the eyes of the coach. But you could also turn that into its own thread rather than saying, okay, the coaches kinda doing his thing, you can say, I want a more separated, distinct thread, that is the coaches story. And in that situation, you have to decide, is my coaches goal worth its own plot? Once you decide whether that coaches story deserves its own plot or not, then you can say, well, do I want to make him a viewpoint character or not? What is the viewpoint that I want for my story? If you make him a viewpoint character, you're allowing me more into his head. You're giving me more time to understand and to know him in a way that I wouldn't. Otherwise. That's not a reason just to make a viewpoint character. Most stories have 1 of view and they stick with that. But I just want you to understand how viewpoint affects the way that we have a relationship as the reader with the characters and how that viewpoint affects the overarching story when it comes to choosing how many scenes is supporting character gets. That's totally, totally up to you. He could have just two or three scenes. He could have half the book. That's fine. You just need to make sure you decide how central is this story. When you're in doubt, keep your subplot shorter. Don't give them the spotlight too often and don't give them the spotlight for too long. Remember that the more, the more time, the more impact you give to a narrative thread and lesser narrative thread, the more you're weakening the impact of your primary story. So if you want to maintain the punch of your primary story, you never want to be away from it for too long. In the next video, I would like us to talk a bit about how we go about choosing our subplots. 9. Choose Strategic Subplots: Now that we've looked at why we use subplots, the kinds of subplots we can use people who might have those subplots. Let's consider that about how you actually go about choosing which subplots you want. We've already addressed this a bit by going over some of the things that we have, but I would like to go into it a little bit further. Now when it comes to choosing subplot, it all depends and hinges on your main story. So you always want to start there because again, you want all of your lesser plot strands to grow out of that main story and be connected to it. One of the ways that you can help think about this is to think about life. You want realistic plot threads. Think about your life. We have large goals, but we have small goals. You might have a goal if a girl is trying to get into university, but she has smaller goals that are going to help her get there. And she might also have this other side goals like being a good daughter or making the school play. So we have large goals and we have smaller goals and those goals tend to conflict with one another. Not all of our goals line up. In fact, very often they don't always line up. We can have internal struggles, we can have health issues. We can be fighting the desire to go have a big hamburger and the desire to look great. And I'm diving suit for swim season. We have all kinds of things that we're dealing with. So again, this goes back to that character development when you're dealing with your character and you're coming up with what is my character going to be dealing with and going through? Ask yourself, how can these things be smaller plots and my story? My best recommendation for this is to go through the lists we've looked at of the kinds of subplots and plot lines you can have. The reasons plot lines are and subplots are powerful in a story. Go down those lists and start to brainstorm. Just say what are the sorts of interesting things that can happen because of these things, that's really where I recommend starting with it. Don't feel committed to anything. Just get ideas going and just start to write anything. Don't let, don't judge yourself and what you write just right. And you want to start by looking at your story as a whole. Look at the entire arc and say to yourself, well, what parts of this story naturally lend themselves to subplots? Because they're usually, are a few things that are very obvious and you're like That should be a subplot. But then this technique can also, by the way, by the way, this also works if you've already written your first draft, you're feeling like it's flat and lacking in depth. You can go back in and say, where, where can I jump off from this and go into more depth? Where can I show the character's development more? You'll find those things where you say, I think there's more I could say over here for an example of this, since you had a character who starts off as an orphan and she ends up as a very successful business woman running her own business, you know, then you want to say, well, okay, how does she make this transition? You can create a subplot that allows her to develop the skills she needed to be a businesswoman. And maybe when she got off the orphan trains, she ran away and she met a woman who was a dress maker and she learns to so, and then after she learns to, so she goes over here and she marries somebody and she learns this other thing and then she eventually runs this shop. What are all of the things that are going to happen that are going to get her to that place of being that successful business woman. Ask yourself how many different people are impacted by what the main character is doing? How is she handling her problem? In a sense, you're seeing how big of a mess can I make of this? I know that our challenge, I know I want to take this orphan and make her into successful businessperson. How complicated can I make that? Because that could be interesting. Then look at how many different people are affected by this. So for example, let's look at a little princess. We have Sarah crew. And Sarah crew has father. Her father has to work, so she has to go to school. We kind of have this plot thread going. Well, she goes away from the home. Again, we're trying to complicate this. So her father has to work. She has to go to school. That's going to make her life more complicated. Not only that, but you're just going to have to go far away to a place she's never know, just grown up in India. She's not going to be there. She's going to go over to a big city. She's never been to. Let's complicate it further. She's going to be around a lot of people she doesn't know, complicated further, the lady in charge of that school hates or can't stand her. This envious of her. Let's complicate it further. That lady has a sister who could have helped her, but her sisters too weak to help. Sarah, her sisters just going Miss Emilia is just going to side with Ms. Mentioned because she's a weak woman. Let's complicate it further and say that some of the children in the school really dislike Sarah as well and would like to see Sarah fail. Some of the children do like her, but they really can't help her. So what happens? Sarah's father dies and she goes from rich to penniless. We've taken a very rich girl, we've made her penniless and an orphan. Now we have a whole new set of characters she's introduced to, like the cook or different people she has to work with because she's been turned into a scullery maid. Let's complicate that further by saying now that she's in this wretched situation, it's actually not who's looking for her, but Sarah doesn't know it. So now we have another character, this man who's trying to find her. Only he happens to live next door and he happens to be very familiar with India, which is kind of interesting in its own complex little, little thing going on in the man who's trying to find Sarah, who's that close to her, but who doesn't know it actually has employed another man to do the finding because the man who is trying to find Sarah is sick and cannot look for him himself. So he employs a man to find Sarah for him. The man he employs has a bunch of children, sat actually ends up by happenstance interacting with those children, not realized. They're the children of the man looking for her who's been hired by the man who was ultimately looking for. Do you see how it gets really complicated? So you say to yourself, what's my main story? My main stories about a really rich girl who gets poor and ultimately gets her money back. How can I complicate that story? And that's what you do. And when you start to play that game, well, what if this, But what if that, well, what if this then you end up with these glorious threads? So that's what I want you to think about doing is just saying to myself, how can I make this as complicated as possible? Once you do that, once you start to find all of the ways things can be complicated is when you sit down and you go and then you say, alright, which, what do I like from all of this? Let me start to pull back coal, the best of these things and then say, how much do I want to go down that rabbit hole? How important is that always keeping in mind every plot that you add pulls away from the power of the main plot if you keep it too long. But every plot that you add pushes the main plot forward. So it's simultaneously, It's wise so delicate, these plots have to strengthen and enhance the main plot, but they also have a serious power of detracting from it if you're not careful, which is again, everyone has to have an arc. Every one of them has to have a conclusion. So make them flush that main plot out we've talked about that make them complex, make them rich in to integrate them into that story so that they're totally inextricable. Let's go back to a story about the girl at the orphanage. How does this affect the other children who she's left behind where she friends with any of those children or any of those going to try to follow her? Maybe maybe not. You don't know. Does she stole away in the back of a car? Maybe that car is owned by a bachelor who is a traveling salesman. He's selling sports equipment. What does he do now? How does this affect his job, his life? Always asked yourself with every step of the things that the protagonists does. How is this changing things? How is this affecting things? You want to keep that front of mind to that end. There are numerous questions that you can ask to try to determine how you can make these things more complex. You can ask yourself, okay, what is the protagonists primary plot problem? And how can I make that primary plot problem worse? How can it be worse actively in the outside world? So, what are outside forces that can make this more complex? But also how can I make it worse than her personal life? How can I make it worse personally for her? How can I make it more complex and worse internally for her? What are the internal torments that are happening because of this? How can I make that problem more complex for other people? How can I make issues that other people have? Because remember, everybody has their own goals, everybody has their own issues. How can I make those things more complex? In a Little Princess, Sara becomes poor. How does that impact everybody around her? We know it impacts Sarah. She's now poor. We well, it makes the girls who hated her feel stuck up, snobby and treat her worse. It makes the girls who doted on her feel lonely because she's not around anymore. It makes them just mentioned totally angry at her mismatch and turns her into a scullery maid. But we complicate Ms. Mentioned goals as well because when Ms. mentioned finds out that Sarah's pour our first inclination is to throw her out onto the street, but she realized she can't do that without looking very bad. So now she's forced to keep Sarah there and have a work for him. So all these complications, how can I make things life difficult for everyone? How will people behave differently because of the problem we just talked about that some girls will treat her worst now that she's poor. Some girls will try to keep being her friend. Some girls will treat her better and kinder and more gently. You know, everybody is going to cheat when you have a big shift in a problem, people's relationships shift, your friends come out and people who you thought you were, where your friends were at, your friends. So how does everybody happen when you make a change? You want to say, how does, how does all the players on my chessboard change because of this? Then always ask yourself, how can I brought in this problem? How can I broaden the scope of it? And then again, always asking yourself, how can I make, what do I want it to be to thinking about this problem? What do I want the reader to take away from it? This is where your themes come in. This is where I want this character to juxtapose this character because I want to make a commentary on the notion of what a family is. So I'm going to have somebody who I think has a really great family and somebody who doesn't have a great family going to talk about methods of family. So that's, those are ways that you do that. Again, you always want to make sure that this subplot is necessary. So in addition to determining exactly how that subplot is going to connect your main plot through the things we just discussed. You want to say, is it necessary? One of the things we can do is say that this plot strands, they must do what are the three things in relation to the climax? They have to finish in the climax, or it has to be something essential to getting to the climax. Or it has to be directly impacted by the climax. If my whole story is building to this one incredibly tense moment, then all of your plot strands, if they're related to your main plot, we'll connect to this climax in some way. They're going to be resolved there. They're going to help you get to it or they are going to be impacted by it once it happens, got to do one of those three things. I might have this subplot where the princess is afraid of getting into the, going onto the boat, into the water. That's a subplot. It's a subplot that's necessary for me to get to that climax. I might have a subplot where she's fallen in love with this handsome young man who's going to help her get her crown back. And in the throes of defeating her uncle, she finally realized that she loves him or he loves her. We haven't known this whole time. She hasn't know. She's wondering to see a little bit. I don't know if he loves me. And then in the climax, he comes through it when he helped save the day and we realized that he loves her. So that got completed in the climax. Or it could be a situation where we had a subplot of her relationship with her grandfather who she thought had died and she's loved him and she missed him so much. But then after the climax, it's revealed by the uncle that no, our grandfathers still alive. And so she's able to find her grandfather again, rekindle this relationship with him. She couldn't have done that. But for the climax. So any of those three, but those plot strands, the older one of those three things. So if it doesn't do one of those things, it's probably not a separate story. Does it mean it can't be in your story? No. But is it worthy of its own plot thread and giving it that time and attention? Probably not. And you will do seriously want to consider it if it actually should even be in your story, because it might be something that you could just totally lift out, in which case, it's not your name. So in the next video, I would just like to go over a few tips and ideas on how you plot and plan these subplots. Once you know which ones you want. 10. Incorporating Subplots: How to Begin: What I'm going over here again is on this course notes. So I hope you have those in front of you because it's going to help you track with me. Now, you can begin weaving your plots together at any point. I really recommend doing it in the planning stages because I think that it makes for the most cohesive stories, the most cohesive writing. So I think it's beneficial to fully develop these subplots as early as you can before you've actually started writing. I know, I know some people like to go ahead and they just like to write and see where the spirit moves them. If that's you, that's fine. But you're still going to want to go back and run your story through these filters to make sure that your subplots hit all of these points. I prefer planning. That's the way I'd like to do it because I think it makes things very tight and cohesive. But some questions you can ask yourself that will help you plot and plan these out in your actual stories. What do I want to accomplish with this subplot? What is my goal? We've talked about this a little bit before. What is the purpose of my subplot? That's going to dictate which scenes you include. Knowing your purpose, what are the events or the situations that need to occur for that goal to be realized. If my goal is comedic relief, I need different situations than if my goal is to develop this certain relationship or if my goal is to create this budding romance different. What's my goal? Knowing my goal, what are the scenes that I want shown? A third question to ask. When you're thinking about, how do I plan all of these subplots? Well, what are the sort of interesting or fun situations? What do I think would make the story more interesting and fun? I don't really know how they fit in yet to the overarching plot, but what do I think it'd be fun? You want to ask yourself that those can, you can find a way to make them in, but you're going to have to then say, okay, how can I take these fun ideas that I have and put them in? And I say this is so important because I know so many riders. You have a plot in mind and you're like, Well, I have this really great part about this princess in this castle and her uncle and the ship, the stone and this handsome young man. And but I have this idea. I just think there'll be this really funny scene where she's trying to get on the horse and she can't and the horse just like this funny scene with the girl and the horse, I don't know how it relates. Write it down. And then as you start to plot these things out, see if you can't make that apart. How can I make this horse part of the story? But you want to consider that to rule out things that you think are fun, but you don't see how they necessarily relate right away as you're planning it. You can try to find ways and see if they fit in. You won't always, sometimes you just have to leave those things you love out. But it can be very helpful. Again, ask yourself which characters do I want to give more presence to? So when you're planning these subplots, what are the characters you love, who you'd like to explore more, use those, make your focus on those, and then ask yourself what aspects of the main character do you most want to bring out? Because you can't talk about all of the traits that your main character has. You have to be selected. So what are the things that you would like to most bring out in that character? I recommend. Because I think focusing on character and starting there is a very helpful thing to do. I would focus first on the characters that you want to bring out of the story the most. Start with them. Ask how you want to bring out and then sort of take each of those characters. And to the best of your abilities, right? Sequentially out, kind of what you think their plot would be, right? A plot arc for each of those characters. Then you can go in and start to try to weave those strands together. Just say, Okay, I'm going to plot out Joe's, our commitment to plot out Sandra's arc. Then I'm going to plot out Misha's arc. And what you'll see when you line those arcs up, you'll start to see places where there's coinciding are conflicting. And that's when you start to adjust and say, alright, I'm gonna do this scene over here, or I'm going to squash this and do this over here. But if you have a cohesive arc for each, that gives you something to track two and follow with. If you just try to sort of be like Okay, well then this is going to happen with Joe and then this is going to happen with Marsha. How does that fit into the whole arc? You need that cohesive work. So right, that cohesive arc first, then start to try to weave together. So once you determine what's our subplots, you want. Plot them out, each individually, considering them in relation to the main plot that you've already plotted out. This is considering that you've already done that first. You want to make that arc, make that arc for each subplot. Again, this means that you want to know what's the goal of the main character for this subplot that's going to drive it. What are their wants, what are their needs, what are their flaws? I have numerous courses on character development. I recommend going through those and then running your most important character is not just your protagonist through those worksheets because that's going to help you immensely. You will be amazed how that helps you plot your story. Then you want to say, how does this subplot effect the main story that will help you write your arc. Now once you've done that, you are going to connect that to the main arc and you're going to connect it to each other. There are some very specific ways that you can then weave these into your story. That's what we will look at in the next video. 11. Weaving Subplots into the Main Story: We've talked a lot about how you want to make sure that you want your subplots relating to your primary plot and being interesting and coinciding are working with the other narrative threads that you have going on. But what does that exactly look like when you're plotting things out? That's what I want us to talk about in this video. Once you've planned your threats, you've planned each one of your threat, you need to then weave these things together. There are numerous ways that you can do this, but I want to run through a few with you that will help you. I think actually plotting your story out. One of the best things you can do for yourself to pay attention to how the books and the films that you love do this because people do it all kinds of different ways. But let's run through a few ideas. The first idea is episodes. This is one that very often authors feel like they shouldn't use because I think it seems very obvious. And I will say you want to be very careful with episodes because I think it's very easy to have episodes that aren't Jermaine. And by the way, you can find this in great books. There are good books. It's still have bits where you just say That actually wasn't Germain. I thought it was fun, but it didn't really fit. But episodes, absolutely, or something that you can do. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn does this remarkably well. The main story, of course, is Jim and Huck going down the river. But they have all kinds of episodes where they get off the boat and then they meet with this person, they get off the boat and this happens and it's a wonderful story. Other great stories that are totally built on episodes. Homer's The Odyssey is entirely episodic. Now, that one is unique because that was done at a time of an oral culture. So it was designed by nature to be episodic so that when someone was going to sit down and recited, he could choose which bits you wanted to recite based on how much time he had to tell the story and the audience he was speaking to. So it's a little bit different, but nonetheless, totally episodic. Alice in Wonderland. Totally episodic. Even Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and some of the Harry Potter books have these little episodes in them. But again, particularly in the case of Harry Potter, which is Harry Potter is not, it is not totally built on episodes. The Odyssey really is. And even Alice in Wonderland, while it has the three plot of Alice trying to find the White Rabbit and ultimately get out of Wonderland. It's really structurally built mostly on episodes. Huck Finn is not. Huck Finn is a forward moving story, quite linear with episodes Harry Potter's much the same way. It's got these episodes like you think of Hagrid and the Norbert dragon that you could really quite lift out. Now it technically has some impact on the story. But if you've ever read Harry Potter without ruining it, There's an episode with Hagrid and the dragon, and it's pretty liftable audible. So that part doesn't necessarily pertain as much, but nonetheless, episodic and it does have some impact. So if you've got a subplot that can function as this sort of side events. Then go ahead and employ this technique. What you want to remember when you do this. If you're going to be episodic, it's better to just start the episode with a new chapter. Don't focus too much on transitions. Start a new chapter to tell that narrative within your narrative and make it very clear. And then when you're done, return to the main narrative. If it takes a few chapters, that's fine. But I think with episodes chapter, hang it off rather than trying to slowly transition into it is a better approach. Another way that you can actually weave these into your story is to do parallel stories. In parallel stories, these are either stories that never quite touch the main plot, although they do impact them, or they run parallel for awhile before they converge as a Song of Ice and Fire has numerous plots like this where we've got two characters run parallel, parallel, parallel, and then eventually they converge. Love actually is another one. If you've ever seen that film that is numerous plots all running side-by-side. At the very end. They all seem to coincide in some fashion or most of them do. But for most of the story, there are similar and theme. They're running alongside one another, another film to watch for this as traffic, traffic does this as well. When you choose to do a parallel story, it is very important. You start with your main plot, get your main plot going in your story. First. Once you have that plot and its character is going, then you can start to insert your parallel stories. Don't try to dump all your parallel stories on your reader at once. Let me get my footing with your main plot. Then go ahead and start adding in these parallel stories, at which point you can then sort of switch back and forth between stories, always tracking most primarily with your main story. So keep that in mind. Now, your parallel plots can vary in how much tension you give them, how long they run. That is up to you. But just keep in mind to establish that main plot first. Another way you can leave these in our two weaving stories that are seemingly disconnected but actually are connected. This is somewhat similar to the parallel stories, but it is different. In many cases when you have parallel stories, we sort of see how they're connected as readers. But you can also write a story in which There are, these don't seem connected. You're telling me two stories and they do not seem to relate to each other. But then we realized that they in fact do relate to each other. If you're going to do this and you're going to jump around between two or three stories that don't seem to connect at all. The watcher, the viewer or the reader is going to assume that at some point they do connect. So you do not want to run these parallel stories and then not follow through on the connection and the links between them. I will say. This is a harder approach to hold a reader's attention because the reader is going to spend so much time asking themselves, what's the point? How do these relate? That it's harder for them to just get invested in the story. The more I have to wonder what the point of what I'm reading is. The less I'm able to just dive in and immerse myself in your narrative. So do keep that in mind. You can, just like parallel stories, make this easier on the reader by introducing them to a main primary character. First, give me someone to attach to. Another way you can do this are converging stories and verging stories are generally two plots that they run parallel, but then they really converge and when they do they go together. Whereas a parallel plot structure is more, they run parallel till almost the end, converging stories parallel for awhile, but then they come together and we spent quite a bit of the story now with these two stories merged in a situation like this, which you generally do is you start your one story and you run with it for a little while. And then you take me over and you start this other story. And for a little bit, you're putting the reader or the viewer in a situation where we're going, okay, what's going on here? I was tracking over here and now we've got this happening. And then then they come together. And then we're hooked in and we're watching them. To make this more concrete. Here's an example of this. And I'm going to really look down for this, sorry, but it's the day of a big sale. Okay. John is a salesman. It's the day of the big sale. He has his suit on, he's ready to go and he walks out of his apartment in New York City. He hails a taxicab and he's headed off to his New York City office. Now we have plot to plot two. We see Clara. Clara also in New York City in a dingy, dingy apartment. She is struggling to get our things into her bag. She seems a bit frazzled. She is also heading out the door in her broken down New York City flat. She's on her way to her job at the fish market. She glances at this framed degree on the wall and we can see that she's got this degree from this university. And she just kinda as this look of what a waste is that this whole this whole thing. She'd been going places, she was on her way, she was going to be an EMT. And then she started having strange dreams. And these dreams kept her up at night. They made her restless. She couldn't work well. She got reprimanded on the job and she was told to straighten up. But then they were on this run in an ambulance and she had this vision in the ambulance while they've got this person is supposed to be taken care of. She she could not explain what happened, but she couldn't do her job in the ambulance because she had this vision. And so the man who she was supposed to be helping in the ambulance actually died. So she got fired. Now she's still having dreams and visions. She doesn't know what they mean. She writes them in this dream journal. She's desperate to make sense of them. She's just frayed and fried. So John, business Sudan, ready to make the sale, hailing a cab, going into his New York office. And then Clara, her life is a mess. She's having these strange visions and dreams. She was going to be an EMT, but now she died and her watch and now she works at the fish market. She's trying to get out the door. So we see that. Now we're back to John. John, the traffic is bad. John's checking his wife's car is not moving. He asks them and can you drive any faster, the mass, just like Mac, what can I do? Look at the traffic. When we tracked back to Clara, Clara's now on the sidewalk, she realizes that she forgot her dream journal at home. She never goes anywhere without that dream journals. So she runs back upstairs to get the dream journal, knowing that now she's really going to have to bolt bolted if she's going to get to that fish market on time. Now we're back to tracking with John. John, he's looking at the Tropic and he just decided it's going to be faster to walk. So he pays the man, he gets out of the cab because he doesn't want to be late for this sale. So now he's on the sidewalk, he's heading over to work. Clara has charging down the stairs now to brace to her job at the fish market or bags in her hands or dream journals in her bag. She runs right into John. Her things go everywhere. He ends up with the journal in his bag when they're trying to shift things and get their things back. So he gets to his office, he opens up his bag and what's in there. But this dream journal, he opens it up. It's like, oh, it's, this must have been that woman's who I bumped into. He opens it up and he starts to read it and then what do you know? But the thing is written in her dream journal describe his childhood to the exact detail. And there was this traumatic thing that happened in his childhood. It was a mystery, he never could solve it. It was very hard for him to get over and he never did solve it in there. In this dream journal is describing him. That's a converging story to separate stories, they don't seem to make sense, but we know they're going to collide. They do collide fairly early in now. What is going to happen with John and Clara? Something That's what makes an interesting converging stories. So they collide. And then from there, who knows what's going to happen. And then you sort of, the next plot is the story of their relationship. You've had his thought, you had her plot, now you've got a new plot, a third plot of the story of those two relationships. Another way that you can make your, your multiple threads joined together is to have one character who is a viewpoint character who then tells these multiple stories. So this is very, this happens in, To Kill a Mockingbird. In Harper Lee's story, the first-person narrative is scout finch. She's a young woman in the South in America, and she interacts with numerous different characters in that story. All of those characters, more or less have their own goals, their own agendas. And while the main plot focuses on scout and her father and this court case that her father administers. Nonetheless, her life is deeply influenced by these various relationships that she has. And through these relationships, we see other people's stories take place just through scouts eyes. We see a very satisfying, very realistic progression of the characters in Scouts life. She's just telling her relationships with them differently, but we get to track those characters through their own developments. So Scouts, the window throughout which we see numerous stories. Now, I will say there's another kind of subplot that does happen in literature, but I do, I think it takes a fine hand to do it, right? And that is where you introduce the story and then you really leave it for awhile until the end. You let it be a mystery throughout most of the story and then you pick it up again. You can do this, but be very careful about it. Because remember that it's still needs to connect deeply to the main plot. It can be harder to make that happen if your subplot is more or less absent through most of the story. So can you do that with a subplot? Yes. But be careful doing that. Another kind of plot that you can do is just closure after the climax. As we talked about, your subplot needs to actually bring the climax to happen, conclude with the climax, or be influenced by the climax. So you can generally and many stories have this in that kind of denim wall to have some closure. They'll have some of these smaller stories that get wrapped up post climax. It's a way to just slow things down rather than make it feel like a sudden. The story is over now bye, a way to bring it slowly down. We've really in many ways completed the big story already because the main story was to achieve this goal. It was achieved. So to avoid just being like Okay, stories over the goal, we want to close up threads. We want to close things up. One of the great exercises you can do is when you're watching films or reading books. Once the climax happens, pay careful attention to everything that happens after it. It's a very short piece of the novel, it's very short piece of the film. But that's where you'll see a lot of the subplots because everything that's happening after that is more or less subplot. We're tying up relationships, we're tying up internal issues, we're tying this up. All of those were subplots. When you identify those, you can then go back and reread the story or re-watch the film and see how did they take those plots and put them throughout. It's a great way to learn about this. Another way to introduce subplots into your story and weave them in is through a gateway character. That's just a character who helps lead the protagonist down a new avenue. If you think of the matrix and the rabbit hole, say you have a typical girl and she is trying to get into this very prestigious university. And she studied very hard for the SAT, but she just, she cannot seem to get in She cannot seem to get her score up high enough to get in to that school than say you have another character who doesn't care about school. One bit. That happens to have a friend who is a great test taker and who earns money on the side by taking tests for people. And that girl is a gateway. She connects our protagonist who needs to acer test with this friend of hers who could take her test. That makes the girl in the middle the gateway person. That's a subplot and that allows you to connect the protagonist to this other world. So that's a way you think about doorway people. Gateway people who can help bridge gaps between where your protagonist isn't, where you want them to go. Alright, in the next video, I just wanted to give a couple of practical ways that you can go about organizing these, because this subplots can get pretty unwieldy. 12. Organizing Subplots and Class Project: Alright, once you've figured out what plots you want to have and what's going to happen in them. Keeping track of that can be a lot. So I just wanted to offer a few ideas you can try them on for size and see if they work for you. One is two. It's sort of what we've talked about before, but you plot things separately and then you weave them together. So work out your main plot and then work out the arcs for all of your lesser threads, and particularly your main lesser threads. And then you'll plot them together. Now, those plots are going to share common ground. Some of those plots, they'll connect, you'll see where you'll go. Well, it actually, these two plots have the same scene in them because those two characters interact. So you're going to find common ground and those which you want to do is start with your main plot. Plot remain poured out like we talked about. Then plot generally. All of these strands separately, treat them respectfully and separately. Once you've done that, go back to your main plot and divide that plot up into its scenes. Now your main plot, you will give the most attention to. If you're not sure how to divide things up into scenes plot one-to-one, and the great scenes mega course will help you do that. So divide your main plot up into scenes. Then you'll do the same thing with the subplots, just your main subplots, divide them up into scenes. And then you can insert subplot scenes into the main plot where they seem relevant and where they fit. Some of those scenes are going to slide right in and they really easy, I'll go, That's a great place for it. Let's slip it in there. There's a gap. We have a gap in the main plot. Let's put the subplot in, but that won't always be the case. Sometimes you will feel like two scenes. They sit side-by-side that the one doesn't easily slip into another one. Let's go back to our example about the student we have her interacting with this mad bargaining about how much you'll pay him to take her test for her. And we also have so we have that going on. We said, Okay, I want this scene where Sarah is bargaining with John to take her tests for her. Well, Sarah has a best friend, and in the best friend arc, we said there's a scene in which Sarah is best friend, Sadie. Just as like, don't do this. This is a bad idea. I don't want you doing this. You don't know the details of how that's going to happen. You just know that seed is going to do that. And you say to yourself, Okay, how am I going to do this? Maybe you merge them. That's one way to do it using, well, maybe CDS there when she's doing the bargaining and CD is going to beg her not to do it there. You might also have scenes where you say, I'm just going to get rid of that scene because these these two so much side-by-side, I don't think it really works. So sometimes when you have those side-by-side situations, you'll just decide to drop one of the scenes and then just take the information from it and fill it in with exposition or a commentary. Are there, what you're doing is looking to the main plot and using that as your main section and then you're filling in it. There's a lot of give-and-take doing this, but it should end up ideally with some kind of master plan. Another way that a lot of my students do that they find very helpful, is to write out all of the plot events on notecards and then lay them out and try to do different color note cards for each person. So blue note cards for the protagonist and pink note cards for somebody else. And write up the events that you know, the scenes that you want to see. Write those all out, then start laying them out. And the reason the color is so helpful is because if you go for a while and you see lots of blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue green. And then we don't see any green for this long. You know, I'm not doing any of character XYZ. I need to be pub more green in here. So filling things out on note cards really allows you to be very visual and move things around. And so that's another way for you to kind of go about visually getting a sense of it. But again, there are wonderful softwares that will let you do this digitally. So you can work with those some people like to outline. So if you've just done a lot of brainstorming ideas and you're not sure about certain things and you think, well that could be interesting and that could be interesting. Take different color highlighters and say, Okay, blue represents character, a green character, be pink characterise, highlight and say, I think this is good for character a and this is good for character be. What you want to do is end up with something that you visually understand. It helps you work through it, but what will help you get there is breaking it down into scenes, plot each one, break it into scenes, and then find how those scenes fit within one another. Having said all of that, I have for you a class worksheet that will help you do this. It's going to help you brainstorm. That is the goal of this worksheet is to really help you generate ideas for subplots in your stories. So there are a number of questions that you will recognize, uh, we've gone through over the course of this story, as well as some suggestions on how you can then take that, break it down and plan it out for yourself. I hope it is helpful. I hope this course has been helpful. If it has, I would appreciate your pleased leaving a review that helps me very much and do take a look at my other course offerings and my website. I do offer teaching opportunities elsewhere that I would love for you to be a positive. As always, I thank you very much for watching. I wish you the best of luck with your writing that I will see you soon. Bye.