Writing Advice: Subplots

At Further Confusion this weekend, I gave my Novel Writing 101 and 102 panels, and in 102 there’s a point where I talk about introducing subplots or “side quests” to break up the second act, especially if you’re feeling stuck or bored. But I emphasized that you shouldn’t just make the subplots be “go to a place and get a thing” over and over, that the characters should be in a different place at the end of the subplot than they are at the beginning.

Someone in the panel asked if I had an example of subplots done well, and after thinking on it for a bit, I turned to my favorite example in furry panels: Zootopia.

The second act is where you usually find subplots, and you might quibble with my characterization of some of these scenes as “subplots.” They are, after all, germane to the main plot of the movie. But if you are tracking the beats of the main plot, “find out who took Emmett Otterton and where” is a main plot beat, and how they do that could be a single scene. Why—from a story standpoint—do we go to the nudist resort and then the DMV and then the Tundratown parking lot and then Mr. Big’s house and then Mr. Manchas’s house?

A scene in a story can do any of four things: reveal setting, build character, advance plot, or support the theme (this comes from Elizabeth Bear at my Clarion workshop). It can do more than one of those things, and the more the better. A subplot is no exception.

What these subplots are mostly doing is building Nick and Judy’s relationship. They are in opposition throughout most of these scenes, with Judy trying to force or trick Nick into helping her while Nick tries to trick her into running out the clock on the case. Nick takes Judy to a nudist resort where he knows she’ll be uncomfortable, but she perseveres and he gains a little respect for her. She refuses to let him off the hook, so he takes her to his friend the slowest DMV agent. Judy learns here how tricky Nick can be, but also how well connected he is. At the parking lot, Judy gets the better of Nick, tossing the pen inside so he’ll chase it and she can follow him, then he sees her charm Mr. Big via the shrew’s daughter. All of these scenes lead up to him gaining real respect for her so that when he sees her being bullied by Bogo, he stands up for her and comes to her rescue. That scene doesn’t happen if they go directly from “who took the otter” to Mr. Manchas’s place.

At the same time, these scenes are showing us more and more of the setting. In Zootopia, the setting is an important part of the story, and the chance to see so many diverse places is really important. After this set of subplots, we don’t get to see too much of Zootopia; we go to the abandoned hospital where the mammals are imprisoned, the ZPD offices, the family farm (these last two we’ve already seen, but we see them in new circumstances), and then we get to see Nick’s hideaway under the bridge, subway tunnels, and a museum. So it’s really important that we get to see more of the city in those early side quest scenes.

And (thanks to the audience member who pointed this out) these scenes also support the theme. At the nudist colony, the elephant who is supposed to have the best memory doesn’t even remember someone who’s been attending her class for years, while the yak remembers every detail down to the license plate of the car that took him. As they approach the DMV, Nick teasingly scolds Judy for assuming that sloths will be slow: “Are you saying that because he’s a sloth, he can’t be fast? I thought in Zootopia, anyone could be anything!” (But of course the sloths are slow—although this sets up the gag that ends the movie.) And Mr. Big is not one of the imposing polar bears, but an arctic shrew. He tells them, “We may be evolved, but deep down, we are still animals.”

Contrast these scenes with the second act of the last Star Wars movie, in which the crew has to go to a planet to get a thing a number of times in succession (I have not watched it since it came out, so I’m not sure, but it seems the number of side quests was about 600). We do get a couple little teases of setting—the festival planet was fun—but the relationships between the characters are all pretty set at this point. Someone dies, and that could have been a big change in the story, except oops, it was a fakeout. Someone makes a sacrifice for the mission, which could have been significant, except that oops, the sacrifice can be reversed so they don’t actually have to give anything up. Very little changes from a character standpoint across all these quests, I’m not sure what the theme of the movie even is, and they don’t really show us anything cool about the Star Wars universe (remember in the first movie when we got to see a farm, a cantina, an enemy space station, and a rebel base?). Plus they don’t even advance the plot, because each maguffin just leads to another one until we finally get to where something happens.

So if you think of a fun diversion for your characters to spice up your second act, remember the four things it can do and see how many of them you can accomplish. And remember: the characters or relationships should not be in the same place at the end as they were at the beginning.