Lynn Viehl over at Paperback Writer is one of my favorite bloggers. She’s a knowledgeable woman who shares great information and experience on her blog. She also does really cool goody bag giveaways during Left Behind and Loving It. 😀 Anyway, today she posted a quick and dirty 10 point plot template for those of us doing NaNo.
I don’t actually need this since I already have my uber detailed outline of TD from a couple of months ago. But as I was looking over her example, I had a bit of an epiphany.
Subplots can be about the main characters.
This was kind of a duh moment, and I’m not sure that I even consciously realized that I thought subplots had to be about other characters. But in my mind, all the stuff relating to the hero and heroine was part of the main plot. Pot thinks this is probably due to all the Nora influence (she’s a big one for writing subplots involving other characters).
Now as Lynn cautions in her post, it’s difficult to write any kind of cross genre template, as each has its own conventions. For example, as Pot pointed out to me this morning, her first subplot, “John and Marcia were created to battle each other but fall in love,” would not be a subplot in romance. It’s the salt to her primary plot’s pepper, “John and Marcia team up to protect diamond, defeat demon thief.”
In any event, it made me realize, I do actually have subplots in TD. I just wasn’t thinking of them as such.
One thought on “Subplot Duh Moment”
I’ll be doing NaNo this year too. My first. My user name at NaNo is cjharley if you’d like to add me. Good luck!