How to Show Ordinary Life in a Meaningful Way Some goals may be boring others exciting. Layers of plot in the story of your life. These are also goals that you could think of as “subplots” in your life.Īnd then you have small daily goals, like getting the grocery shopping done or finding a company to come shampoo your carpets.
You may have the goal of losing ten pounds over the next few months. You may have some more immediate goals of trying to write a paper for a class or put a presentation together for your job.
Subplot in a story full#
Life is full of short-term and long-term goals. Much of your time, effort, and thinking may wrap around a big goal. The “big” goal in your life may be to find a person to marry, raise a family, get a college degree or a great job, scale Mount Everest. Some of these goals are big and cover years of your life. Our lives are multilayered with different objectives or goals, and if you look at your life in these terms, you can identify numerous goals you are pursuing each day, year in and year out. Novels should be portraying a slice of real life (but just more interesting, we hope). We want our characters to have lives that feel real and similar to our own. And that makes for a dissatisfied reader. In addition to being irrelevant to the novel’s purpose and premise, they are often boring, featuring mundane concerns and activities that don’t add anything of interest. These subplots feel dropped in as noise and distraction, and I’ve sometimes found myself skimming pages to get past them in order to get back to the gripping main plot. I have read numerous novels, some by best-selling authors, who have subplots thrown into their stories that don’t fit at all. Regardless, whatever side stories you weave into your novel, they need to impact your protagonist.
Subplots can involve your protagonist and/or your secondary characters. So, if you keep in mind that any subplots you create should add to the main plot in a meaningful way, that can help you come up with some interesting and helpful subplots. What do I mean by “serve the advancement” of the main plot? Your main plot is all about a protagonist going after a goal in the midst of conflict and high stakes. If you keep in mind that everything that goes into your novel must serve the advancement and complication of the main plot, you will fare well. Writers need to be careful not to throw any old subplot into a story in the hope it will just add some interest. No, there isn’t a “secret” method to come up with a great subplot, but find your main theme, and that will point the way for you.īefore I elaborate, let me say this. Even a Bourne Identity can have themes of integrity, loyalty, doing the right thing, risking life and safety for others, exposing evil.īut this brings me to my point, in order to answer the first question. What’s the point of a thriller aside from the thrill? I’ll venture to say, though, that even genres that don’t “need” subplots can often benefit from one, if it’s pertinent to the overarching plot and point of the story. A subplot might slow down pacing and distract. While your best-selling thriller, like The Bourne Identity, won’t often have a subplot, readers aren’t looking so much for depth or theme as they are for the ride. I can’t speak for every novel, but I will say that a novel with merely one main plot may come across shallow or one-dimensional. Is there some secret to coming up with a great one? And does every novel need a subplot? There isn’t much written on crafting subplots-which I find odd. If you’re writing a novel or planning on writing one, you maybe have considered adding in a subplot or three. We may instinctively know how they work in story structure.
We see them in the movies we watch, and they are usually in every novel we read. A subplot may involve the main character or minor characters, but they enrich the story if done well. They are those side stories that give a novel’s plot depth.
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