How do I make sure my audience is aware of subplots?
In a first person story I am writing, I have many subplots going on, but when I started writing it, I realized that the subplots were not obvious. How can I make it more clear that progress is occurring to my subplots?
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Don't worry about it in your first draft. Wait until your second, possibly your third. Your first draft is to get the story down on paper. Then you let it sit for a month and go back. The second draft is to fix all the glaring errors you pick up in your first review.
After a second (fourth, etc.) round, hand it off to a trusted reader. Ask the trusted reader after the reader is finished if the subplots were obvious enough. Take the reader's suggestions to beef them up.
This is an obstructed arborvision problem: you won't be able to see the forest for the trees, because it's your story and you know where all the plot threads are. You have to ask for outside opinions to get perspective.
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You need to be very conscious of the difference between history and story. If you have multiple sub plots that are not obvious, there is a good chance that they are more history than story.
History is a bunch of stuff that happens. History consists of many things happening at the same time in independent threads, so you have to do some folding of time-lines in order to describe all the various threads.
But story is something very different. Story is like a bent bow. It is an arc of rising tension. Everything you tell should contribute to that arc of rising tensions. You don't follow the logic of history in telling a story. You follow the logic of tension. Sub plots should follow their own arc of rising tension, but should also in some way contribute to the rising tension of the main plot.
So, it does not actually matter that a subplot is not advancing in time sync with you main plot. What matters is, where does the insertion of the sub plot in the narrative contribute to the arc of rising tensions. If that means telling the sub plot out of sequence with the rest of the time line, that's fine.
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