How to Write Subplots For Your Book

Subplots offer a great way for you to add dimension to your story. Subplots give you the opportunity to shed light on your book’s broader world by focusing on mini-stories generally driven by your story’s secondary characters. Watch the video below to learn how to set up your book’s subplots.

Main Plot Vs Subplots

In the image below you’ll see that I have all of my plot cards organized digitally. Here you’ll see each plot card shows me my plot point, title, summary, location, the characters who are in this chapter as well as how far along I’ve come in terms of reaching my writing goals for this chapter.

Now, just above the chapter writing progress bar, you’ll notice little color coded “tags”. These tags can serve as many things, but one of the most common uses for chapter tags is to mark your book’s subplots. In the image above, you can see that one of my chapters touches on my “love story” subplot while the chapter beside it touches on my “mentor” subplot.

Now, of course you can map out your plot using sticky notes if you want, but if you want to follow along and use this story plotting tool I’m using here then simply head over to Scribble and sign up today.

Using “Tags” as Subplot Markers

Within Scribble, you can add tags when you’re on your main “writing pad” page (see image below).

On this page simply click on “add tags” and then add your tags. One really important note is that if you plan on re-using the same tag to represent one subplot, the tag needs to be spelled exactly the same each time.

For example, if you name your tag “love story” to represent your love story subplot, you need to write “love story” exactly the same each time you add it to a new chapter. This way over on your “subplot page” it will group all tags called “love story” as the same subplot. If you named them different things, they would show up as different subplots.

Another detail about adding tags, is that you can also color code them for easy visual identification. What we suggest doing is coloring each tag you want to group, the same color. Again, it just helps you stay organized.

Okay, now back on our “plot visualization page” what we have in front-of us right now is our story with a focus on our main plot or through-line (again notice the tags that show up on this page).

This is the main story that gets us from the beginning, all the way to the end. However, what if we want to dive into these subplots in more detail? After all, these subplots aren’t just passing mentions in a chapter, they are stories in and of themselves, with characters, sub-goals, arcs and twists.

Thereore, in order to give these subplots the attention they deserve, we can go over to this subplot page here which will allow us to plan out our subplots in great detail.

Viewing Your Books Subplots Visually

Keep in mind, this page will only show your subplots once you’ve added tags to your individual chapters (see the main subplot page below).

So here, where it says “all chapters”, I can see all of my 24 book chapters laid out here. The chapters are color coded based on their acts. Here we have act 1, Act 2a, Act 2b and the 3rd and final act to the right. If we roll over the chapter, we’ll see the chapter title and description. Just above the chapters, you’ll see the small cards here which represent the main story’s plot points. For example, here above chapter 9, we have the first pinch point.

But the main story and the main story’s plot points aren’t our focus on this page. Again, we can see these details, in much better detail over on our main story’s plot visualization page. Here, these main plot cards are included for visual reference, so you can keep an eye on your main story while you’re planning the placement of your subplots.

Viewing Your Subplots Position Compared to Your Main Plot

These subplots, which you see below the surface here, are the main things we’re interested in over on the subplot page. So once we’ve added a tag to a chapter, it will show up on this page here. Here, for example, I can see my tags relating to my “love story”. Or below that, I can see my “mentor” subplot from beginning to end.

So let’s look at how this works in more detail. Once a tag has been added to a chapter and color coded, it will show up here. Keep in mind that rather than adding chapters one by one, you can use our 24 chapter plot template.

Now as a side note adding subplots to your story is important because in the majority of cases, a story without subplots would likely start to feel repetitive.

If we look above at our main plot here, if we just followed our main character trying to achieve their goal, we risk our story feeling a bit 2 dimensional after a while.

Why are Subplots Important in Literature?

Subplots help us:

– Break up the monotony of the main story.
– Connect our audience to multiple characters within our story.
– They allow us to explore our story’s theme from different angles.
– They allows us to add more complexity to our story.
– The help us develop more well rounded characters.
– They help us flesh out our world.
– They help us keep momentum going in our story’s middle since we can place dramatic sub-plot moments in spaces where perhaps our main story is in a bit of a lull.

So now that we know this, we need to start placing our sub-plots within our story. So there are few main parts to a subplot.

Considerations When Designing Subplots

First of all, although these subplots are mini-stories they are not breakaway stories and therefore need to be connected to our main story in some way. These mini-stories are used to either help push our protagonist through to their end goal within the main story here. Or, they are used to obstruct our main character from achieving their goal in the main story line.

Subplots are also connected to main story line here because they often allow us to explore our story’s theme from different angles, or from different character’s point of views and they also help us better define our story’s secondary characters.

Again, within Scribble, over on our people and places page, you’ll see we have a character profile template (see image below).

Just click on “edit” here and you’ll be able to design your characters from the ground up. And it’s important that you don’t just do this for your main character. Your secondary characters are not props for our main character to use to push their story forward. No…. These secondary characters should feel like real, living breathing people.

Once you’ve developed your characters using this character profile template, you can take this a step further by adding this character as the main person this subplot revolves around. In the vast majority of chases, subplots are linked to individual people, or sometimes groups of people. Essentially, it will be this person’s mini story that we’re following.

So again, in order to associate a character with a subplot, we first need to have a character added to our book. So over on our book’s people and places tab we can add a character by cliking on the “add character” button.

We can even use our built in A.I character avatar generation tool to design our character for us based on the prompt we enter on that page. Once your character is added, back on our subplots page, we can associate this character with our subplot just to the left of each subplot line.

So now we can visually see this character is the character that represents this mini-story. So visually, already this is very helpful. But we can go deeper than this.

Subplot Arcs

That’s because we can click on each of these subplot points. When we do this, the following page will show up.

Now first, notice that, a subplot, like a main plot, will have an inciting incident, the character who represents this subplot will generally have a goal, there will be obstacles, a climax as well as a resolution.

This means, we can now map out the arc of our subplot. Notice that each sub-plot point is visually represented by different icons. Again, look at the icons just below each subplot point.

This allows us to see how Story B’s or Story C’s subplot is progressing, as well as where it’s progressing in relation to the main plot’s plot points.

Another helpful feature within this tool is the ability to plan out your subplot’s summaries. This allows you to really plan out the purpose of each subplot scene. Equally important are these two other tabs that you’ll see beside the summary tab. On the first tab you can write down how this subplot will impact your main plot. How it’s either supporting or obstructing your main story’s plot.

And you can even get more complex than this. In some of the most interesting stories I know of, the subplots not only interact with the main plot, but they also interact amongst themselves. It adds a really interesting level of complexity, when something in subplot B has a consequence in subplot C.

Conclusion

Now there is a lot more to be said about subplots and I’ll do so in upcoming videos and publish them over on our writing blog. But for now, if you want to use this subplotting tool, or any of the other plotting or character development tools showcased in this video, then simply head over to scribble today to start playing around.

Thanks for stopping by today.