subplots and MacGuffins…

I’ve been a bit distracted lately, which means, for Diana’s Diversions, that I’ve actually been focused on my work. Have been working on the outline for SOCIETY2, which sucks up all loose blogging energy and… well, ideally converts it to plotting capabilities of the first water. However, if you were to look at the current outline, you’d wonder if perhaps all of my loose blogging energy weren’t being converted into plotting capabilities of a brackish drowned estuary. (See, you can’t keep the geologist in me down!)

Okay, it’s not that bad. It is, however, the first sequel I’ve ever written, so there are arguments to be made for the concept of a learning curve. This is why I have started early. This puppy ain’t due ’til February. The main challenges I see in plotting this book are:

1. Making it stand on its own for readers who have no had the honor of experiencing SOCIETY1.
2. Not repeating myself or doing retreads for readers who have had that honor.
3. Doing justice to ongoing story arcs and character development.
4. Doing the above while also presenting a straightforward and exciting plot throughline.

I don’t think I do a lot of subplots in my books, or if I do, they are subplots that feed DIRECTLY into my main plot. Things like “they fall in love while vanquishing the bad guy.” So perhaps not subplots so much as MacGuffins.

**Start digression**MacGuffin, for the uninitatiated, was a term coined by Hitchcock to refer to the driving element of the story — what the characters are in search of — which is nevertheless not what the story is actually ABOUT. For instance, in my favorite Hitchcock film, Notorious, Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant are spies searching for uranium dust hidden in wine bottles (I know, I know), but that’s just the excuse to get them together and put them in a situation to fall in love and for her to betray him and for him to betray her and for them to both feel hurt about it and eventually redeem themselves. Also an excuse for More Claude Rains (MCR). MCR, in my mind, is not entirely unlike my theory of Alan Rickman Makes Everything Better (ARMEB). (See? Hitchcock has his jargon and I have mine.) In North By Northwest, the MacGuffin is “Kaplan’s” stolen microfilm. And if you just thought to yourself “What microfilm? All I remember is the train and the plane and the Mt. Rushmore thing and Eva Marie Saint seducing Cary Grant,” then you are doing exactly what Hitchcock wants you to when he establishes a MacGuffin. You’re focusing on what the movie is really about rather than whatever “thing” the characters are supposedly chasing. Of course, the ultimate MacGuffin is the Maltese Falcon, which is in true Hollywood meta-fashion is revealed in the end to be not worth all the attention paid to it. **End digression**

As I was saying… A lot of writers do this thing in editing where they go back and start combining scenes and characters and cutting them because they don’t serve more than one purpose in the story. I’ve never had to do that — knock wood. Because I don’t have a lot of subplots. When I have an “outside” scene, it usually directly relates to soemthing very complex about the characters’ main storyline.

There’s definitely a challenge inherent in this technique when you’ve got a situation like in SOCIETY, where there is a harsh delineation between “inside” and “outside” worlds; you’re trying to make sure that the outside scenes don’t have NOTHING to do with the society scenes and vice versa. In fact, the argument could be made that this is what my story is really about — the line where your society ends and the rest of your life begins, and what happens when they bleed over onto each other, and whether that’s okay or even desireable or not.

Hmmm, food for thought. Perhaps attacking each scene that way will help me make sure they all have the relevence they need to be included in the book. (It’s nice to be able to work this out on paper, though I know that half of what I’m saying here will probably only resonate for the three or four readers of this blog who have actually READ the book at this point…)

However, I have all of these gorgeous ideas of what I want my characters’ lives to contain in this novel, and all these scintillating little set pieces, and I have to make sure that they ALL refocus back into the throughline. Somehow.

One of the things I was most proud of with the last novel (I hope I still feel this way when reviews come out) was the complexity of the interpersonal relationships. Great piece of writing advice from Orson Scott Card: If you have three characters in a novel, you have four relationships: A’s with B, B’s with C, A’s with C, and A, B, and C together. It gets even bigger every time you add a character. You have to add D with all of them individually, D with each pair of them, and all four together. See how complicated it can get? Every time you’ve got a group of people, they are not all going to relate to each other in the same way, and they might act differently with only one person around than they would when they were with the whole group. You might have two people who hate each other but each like a third person, so put on a happy face whenever they are all together. You might have someone who wears a mask until he gets you alone, then drops his guard. And you’ve got to get this all come out without sacrificing the reader’s concept of that character as a character. They have to be both inside the box and out of it. Of course, some or all of this can be organic, but every time you run into a snag, you have to step back and think about it. (I’d love to talk about where I had to think about it and where it just came out. Remind me to do so when the book comes out and I’m not spoiling anything).

So I’ve got all of these complex interpersonal relationships going on in this novel that I have to develop even further in the next novel. I could write a book just about that, I think. The drama of college networks and relationships and romance. But that’s not all the Secret Society Girl books are. There’s also the suspense element (says so write in my contract: “romantic comedy and suspense). There’s also the conspiracy theories. I love my idea for the conspiracy in SOCIETY2, and I think I’ve almost hit upon the way to tie them altogether, but it’s going to take more digging.

So that will keep me busy. (Have I lost you all yet?)