If there’s one thing I hope you’ve learned from this channel, it’s that a writer’s main job is to write a compelling story. If there’s another thing I hope you learned from this channel, it’s that writing really isn’t all that important and you shouldn’t get so caught up in your writing that you neglect being a good father or husband or boss or citizen or motorist.

And a truly compelling story isn’t just one story, but several stories that overlap, intertwine and culminate in a whole that’s more than the sum of its parts.

A subplot is a secondary storyline that runs beside the main one. A good subplot should do some of the following things:

• deepen characterization

• add nuance
• activate your themes
• enhance your worldbuilding
• get other writers in your writing group to stop laughing at your stories behind your back
• remove the need for you to follow literary agents to their house
• get you good reviews on Amazon more reliably than the Chinese company you paid to post fake positive reviews.

Readers get bored with just focusing on one narrative. Even this video series exemplifies this. Fans of the channel will know that while the main thrust of my videos is to teach you good writing techniques, I try to keep things interesting by adding several subplots: for example, my office being burned down by my business partner’s reckless disregard for fire codes, and my ongoing feud with Tabitha Cartwright who acquired the rights to most of my backlog after she got me out of some child support payments. And fans will know my biggest subplot is about my desire to get back with my second and favorite wife. In today’s video, I will illustrate why subplots are essential by adding a story about how I got her back.

Now Let’s look at some key tips to writing good subplots.

Step 1: Know the type of subplot

This is going to be a longer than usual step, so if you want to go get a snack or double check that you locked your gun safe, now might be a good time. The first kind of subplot is the mirror subplot. Here, a secondary character faces a similar conflict to the main character in the main story, but often with a different outcome.  In my story, Jane Donovan, both the main protagonist and her husband have to grapple with sexual feelings toward others. Jane, however, is able to control her urges and realizes her family needs her. Her husband, on the other hand, rawdogs fourteen different yoga classmates, sex workers and school teachers and ends up dying of syphilis.

The foil subplot depicts a character who is actively working against the main protagonist. It doesn’t always have to be the main anttagonist. In the Lord of the Rings, both Boromir’s and Gollum’s subplots serve as foils. The foil can even be accidental. In Son of Sam I Am, a side character is also chasing after the serial killer, but he disrupts the police’s search by visiting the crime scenes, getting sexually excited and contaminating the scene with his DNA.

Then there are flashback subplots. These stories often give us insight into the motivations or the backgrounds of the main character or the villain. The flashback in A Man Called Ove leads to a heartbreaking realization about the main character’s wife. The flashback in my time-travel thriller There’s No Place Reich Home reveals that character doesn’t want to kill Hitler to save the Jews or prevent World War II, but rather because his name is Douglas Hitler and he’s tired of being ridiculed and attacked.

And then we have the romantic subplot, which was invented to sell more movie tickets to women and men who don’t get erections from large explosions. The romantic subplot should ideally complicate things for your main character, just as my obsession with my second wife delayed several of my book releases and got me hit with a restraining order so for many years I had to rent a car if I wanted to drive by her house.

Step 2: Write character driven subplots

In all of those examples, the subplots are driven by character motivation. Subplots are all about introducing new goals and obstacles, either for the main character, their allies or their opponents. A subplot should also flesh your thinner characters out. When I first wrote, the coming-of-age drama House on Pain Avenue, Daniel’s brother Derrick wasn’t much of a character. I mostly had him laugh at Daniel’s jokes so the reader would understand that he was funny in case my jokes didn’t always land. But he lacked motivation, so I gave him a side plot about him and his fraternity poisoning the dean.

When I talk about my second wife on here, you mostly here about her from my perspective: how great I thought her tits were, how she opened me up sexually, how she was the first woman who ever made me laugh. But if I were treating this video like a novel, I’d mention how she ran away from home at seventeen, not from abuse but to start her own gambling business.

Step 3: Make sure your subplot has its own arc

A subplot is not just filler like you might put into your second wife’s new boyfriends gas tank. It needs to be resolved in some way, possibly in connection with the main story, or even as a side note in your epilogue. If you can take the reader by surprise, all the better.

So to finish my subplot, I’ll bet most of you assumed I became a better person, apologized for my indiscretions and got my wife to leave her boyfriend and take me back. But that would break the other essential rule of fiction writing: don’t be a cliche.

Luckily, that’s not what happened. Instead, I used today’s sponsor, Eros Escorts, to hire someone with a vague resemblance to my wife. After some hair treatments and other cosmetic procedures, the resemblance was uncanny. Over a period of a few months, I trained her to act the part and talk the part, giving her speech lessons and a script from which to recite her lines. And after this process, we both decided we were meant for each other. It’s been a terrible drain on my writing and this channel, but, well, this is one subplot that I’m pretty sure is going to have a happy ending.