How many times have you sat down at your desk at work and did one thing without interruption until it was finished?
My bet is that the answer is almost never.
Things happen: an email comes in that must be responded to immediately, your boss demands that you finish another task before you complete the one you’re working on, as your working you realize that you need to do this other thing first in order to do what you’re doing.
We get pulled in so many different directions when all we want to do is get this one thing done.
Novels are like that.
Your character has two goals—an inner goal that will eventually make them a happier, more fulfilled person; and an outer goal which will fulfill some concrete need or desire. The point of your story is get your character from wherever they are at the beginning of your story to a person will fulfilled goals who has learned and grown through the events of the story.
But just like in life, our characters cannot just do one thing, have just one goal, strive for it and get there without constant interruptions and having to deal with so many other people—who all have their own agenda. Life is messy. Your story has to be messy as well.
So, how many plot lines do you have?
- Protagonist’s internal goal
- Protagonist’s external goal
- If you have more than one protagonist, if you’re writing romance, for example, there will be the internal and external goals of the first protagonist. And frequently, the goals of #2 are going to interfere with the goals of #1 and vice-versa.
- There is also the overarching plot-the romance, the murder that must be solved, the political alliance that must be forged. Whatever it is that’s another plot line.
- In romance novels, there are usually two different major plots: the romance itself, and then an external plot (a mystery to be solved, a life to save, a world to save)
- And then there are subplots, things that are important and will eventually lead the characters to their goals or help them to learn and develop, but are not the main plot of the story.
How many is that? At the low end 3, at the high end it can be as many as 7 or 8.
How do, you keep it all together? Keep track of it all?
You can create a W-graph where you graph out the different overlapping plots. That will show you where they intersect and where different plots are at different points in the story because the major beats of one plot will never align with the beats of another. This is the easiest visual way to see your novel.
Another way is simply to make a list of each plot line and what happens at each beat.
One of the most important things to remember, though, is to mix up the scenes from the different plots. Of course, the main reason for this is suspense. Your reader will experience Plot A, then have to pause while they experience Plot B, pause that to see what’s happening in Plot C. All the while, they are waiting to see what happens in Plot A. Hopefully, your reader will be hooked and forced to read on to find out what happens in each plot until they are all tied up together in a pretty bow at the end of the novel.