Revising Your Creative Fiction Writing Help

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Here are two exercises in which you can gain practice with subplots by writing subplots that are missing from stories you know. In addition to gaining practice with subplots using the exercise ideas, you might also find you can develop the exercises into short stories of their own.

1. Do you remember the classic short story "The Lady, or the Tiger" (www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/LadyTige.shtml) by Frank Stockton? In it, a king has a particular method of dealing with those he doesn't like—they must go into a ring and choose one of two doors—behind one is a beautiful lady and behind the other, a ferocious tiger. When the king discovers that his daughter is in love with a young man who is below her royal station, he wants to get rid of him by putting him in the arena, to either be torn apart by a tiger or married to a beautiful maiden of his station.

"The ranks of maiden youth and beauty throughout the land were carefully surveyed by competent judges, in order that, the young man might have a fitting bride in case fate did not determine for him a different destiny." We learn that ultimately the maiden chosen is one the princess believes she has seen making flirtatious gestures to the youngman. The princess has gotten word to her lover that she will know what is behind which door and signal him which to choose. He assumes she means the one with the maiden. But the author asks us to think about which we think she would choose—one that allows her lover to have a life with someone else or the one that will destroy him because of her jealousy.

In the story of the king's intervention between the lovers, there is to be a search for the beautiful woman who is suitable for the lover, but the search is not written. The princess figures out a way to learn what is behind each door, but we don't learn what that way is. The daughter and the father don't interact about his decree.

For practice with subplot, read "The Lady, or the Tiger" and imagine where you might fill out the story. You could write the story of the men who must search for the maiden who will be behind the door. You could write the feelings and thoughts of the maiden chosen to be behind the door to illustrate her knowledge of and troubles with the princess. You could write interactions between the king and the princess. You might figure out where the queen has gone and what she has to say.

2. Do you know the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard? In it, the playwright builds a plot using two of Hamlet's minor characters, schoolmates and friends of Prince Hamlet. The action of Stoppard's play is described as taking place "in the wings" of Shakespeare's play, with occasional appearances by Hamlet's major characters in fragments of the original play's scenes. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are, of course, confused by events that they did not participate in during Shakespeare's Hamlet. This clever idea for a play helps illustrate subplot because it reverses what we normally view—events involving the play's main characters become a subplot and the minor characters take center stage.

You can borrow this idea for a writing exercise: Find or create a minor character for a story you have read—the kid across the street or a dogwalker who passes by each day, or an unhappy worker, for instance.

Write about an event in the story from this minor character's point of view. What was this character doing at the time of the events? What was happening in his or her own life at the time? Why is talking about this event important to the minor character if at all?

If you'd like, write a scene in which the main character does what he or she always does—writes a book, runs a company, keeps house—and comes up against obstacles you plot—writer's block, a difficult worker, something going wrong with the kids or the plumbing. Write a subplot in which the main character meets the minor character you have expanded or invented. What happens that illuminates the main characters' concerns? What happens that ultimately helps the main character overcome an obstacle? What happens that keeps the main character from overcoming an obstacle? You may have a good story there.

More on Subplots

There are several kinds of subplots. Parallel subplots go on for awhile in parallel, allowing the author to tell a story from more than one point of view. Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper (http://books.google.com/books?id=0ubs8rj-h1QC&printsec=frontcover&cd=1&source=gbs_ViewAPI#v=onepage&q&f=false) has parallel stories as the boys trade lives and live in the situation they each thought they wished to live in. Hailey Mills's movie The Parent Trap has a similar turn of events, as twins meet at summer camp but return to one another's home, unbeknownst to the parents. Of course, the main plot is the story about what happens as a consequence of the trading.

Episodic subplots form a chain of adventures involving the main character; these are stories in and of themselves, and readers follow the character's journey through these adventures to safety and/or home. Stories with episodic subplot structure that we've read in school are A Thousand One Arabian Nights (http://books.google.com/books?id=xSIYAAAAYAAJ&dq=A+Thousand+One+Arabian+Nights ) and The Odyssey (http://books.google.com/books?id=ezJJAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=The+Odyssey&cd=1#v=onepage&q&f=false). Imagine the Harry Potter stories presented in one novel instead of a series; they would be episodic.

Some stories, such as Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger, are told entirely in flashback inside a frame of the present. If, however, flashbacks are not the whole story, they can be considered a kind of subplot. Authors warn, though, that using flashbacks is risky because they interrupt action in the now of the story, which can frustrate readers. Still, well-placed flashbacks help readers accumulate knowledge of the character motivations. When post-traumatic stress disorder is a part of the main character's life, for instance, events in the now of the story set off memories from before the story began. Seeing aspects of the character's life in well-placed flashbacks can inform the story, build interest, and set up suspense about what the character will do given the back story.

In the novel Flash Forward by Robert J. Sawyer and in the recent television series loosely based on the novel, writers have played with the concept of flashbacks by using flash forwards. In the story, everyone on earth becomes unconscious at the same time and sees themselves in a situation that will occur in the future; it is presumed that those who didn't see themselves in the future will be dead. The stories that come of characters trying to find others who were in their flash forwards, and of characters trying to ward off what will happen to make them lose their lives, create subplots, while the main story is about a core group of FBI agents trying to figure the event out and prevent it from happening again.

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Here are exercises to help you play with parallel, episodic, and flashback/flashfoward subplots. Again, the writing you produce will not only help you build subplot writing skills but may also become short fiction of its own. If you choose a character from an old short story written in English around which to develop a subplot, you will probably find that the short story is out of copyright and in the public domain. You could write an original piece inserting your subplots into the main story. Come up with a great title, and you'll have something interesting.

1. Flashbacks/Flashforwards—Think of a time in your character's life or in the life of a character from literature that occurred several years before the story starts. What in the character's life today makes him or her remember that time? Write a piece in which the character indulges him or herself in memories of that time. If you take a character from literature, practice putting pieces of the flashback into the action of the published story.

Think about what the character you've chosen might have a premonition about. Write a piece about that premonition. Fully imagine the scenes in the premonition as well as the character's reactions. Can you put pieces of the premonition into the main story?

By thinking about how your character deals with the memories and premonitions, you may create a story made of two parts, flashback and flashforward; or you might be writing one that entwines flashbacks or premonitions into a larger story.

2. Parallel Subplots—Think of two minor characters from a story you've written or one you've read. Write two parallel subplots concerning their individual lives when they are "off stage" in the story they came from.

For instance, in "The Inn," a tale by Guy de Maupassant, a mother and her daughters hike with a young Swiss man named Ulrich Kunsi to their family's inn in the mountains. Kunsi will be caretaking the inn over the winter along with an older man named Gaspard Hari, while the family remains in the village. Kunsi takes an instant liking to one daughter in the family and spends his winter longing for her. One day, Hari leaves the inn to do chores and doesn't return. Kunsi searches and searches for him, but to no avail. For the rest of the winter, Kunsi believes he hears Hari moaning nearby. In spring, after the roads are clear of snow, the family returns to the inn and finds Kunsi has gone mad.

Choosing characters from this story, you could write parallel subplots that involve the daughter in the village and how she is longing for Kunsi just as he longs for her, or about Hari, who haunts Kunsi. Or you might write two parallel subplots in which each character is, in their own way, as isolated as Kunsi is at the inn—perhaps the daughter is isolated from her family for emotional reasons and Hari is isolated from the inn due to ice and weather or a fall. What do these characters think, see, feel, deal with, and remember? When will you have the characters' lives intersect or become linked and how?

3. Episodic Subplots—To practice writing episodic subplots, think of a character on a journey. This character can be on a simple journey that becomes complex. In a children's story, for instance, a mother might tell her child it is time for the child to get into pajamas for bedtime. While the mom is finishing washing the dishes, the child may journey from the kitchen to the bedroom, but have many adventures on the way—feeding goldfish, playing with a dog, completing a puzzle, dreaming about climbing a tree that is outside the house, and so on. Maybe the pajamas are in the laundry basket in the basement of an old house, and the journey involves getting to the pajamas and having spooky adventures on the way. Or maybe the pajamas are on a clothesline outdoors, and the adventures involve noticing the outdoors and creatures in it in a new way.

An adult journey might be something like this: A wife asks her husband if he brought home something he promised to get while on a business trip, and he says he didn't. When she asks "How come?" he can relate a series of adventures that kept him from completing the task, entertaining her and easing her annoyance.

Writing subplots for fun will help you learn to fill out the stories you create, whether they are short or longer fiction.