When I read tales that switch plotlines from chapter to chapter, I often cringe as I am yanked out of the action. Yet, like a fool, when I begin writing my own novel I find myself doing the same thing, and even worse, I have more than two plot-lines.

When do you think readers just get fed up with keeping track of several narratives all with related but seperate details.
 

I'm not sure why that is, but most authors, and editors, seem to think it's wise to have at least two plot lines in a story. A lot of times, this is the main character's story and the love interest's plotline sharing book pages.

As I reader, I've never been to warm to it, because I always, always like one of the stories better than the other, and I'll always remembered a book I was reading where the main character gets into a major conflict, and the author leaves it at a cliff hanger, and goes back hours and hours of story time to the other plot that was going on to bring it up to speed.

That's a secret t it. If you have one good, compelling story, you can make cliff hangers out of it, and drag out a fifty pages at a time with your subplot, that's less interesting, and the read will keep turning pages, anything to get back to the real story. The truth is, when do write like that, it's jarring, and everytime you flip over, the read er has to stop and make a mental adjustment.

So, in my opinion, you can go ahead and make 2 or even 3 plots in a book and weave them together, and you'll get away with it, but, I'd rather write, and read one larger plot that's great all the way through.

 

For a person that could put his name on an out of date phone book and sell a million copies, there are no rules anyway.

I'll be kinder, I suppose. The main reason for having a number of different characters is to broaden the audience. As Mr. Lovegrove says, any reader will identify with one of the characters and his or her dilemma more than any of the others. the readers all turn the pages just to follow the one story that each is really interested in. But, this will not the same story for each reader. One reader is taken with the heroic figure, who faces the ultimate temptation of power beyong imagining, while another is really most interested in the plight of the old man that's trying to keep his family together in the midst of a catastrophic upheaval in the world. Weave both stories together, so that each story impacts the outcome of the other, and the reader accepts both, one because it is the main story and the other because it provides pivotal actions to the main story.

But there is no point in trying this if you aren't already saturating your primary audience by selling a million copies. Even if you could sell a million copies, I would just write some other 'parallel' novels about the other characters. Most of the time, you can just have one main protagonist and leave any other characters subordinate to that character. Myself, I would go for single POV throughout as an artistic consideration, even if it made the storytelling more difficult to follow. But then, that's just me (though why should the reader have it any easier than my character?).
 

The critique group I am in just went through this discussion almost to thepoint of a true all out fight. I myself prefer a clear cut main plot with a few subtle ones running under the surface that weave in and out of the main one.

The crit group saw otherwise. I was asked is this the only plot line? It wasn't and isn't but on page 60 something of actual bookpages the others had not been much developed yet.

So how much devevlopment needs to go into a sub plot? Can it be there and be touched on without devoting entire chapters to it, or will the reader lose that sub plot all together? And when should you put the entire chapter into the sub plot? I would think that you should develop your main plot with small hints to the developing sub plots first otherwise the main plot would have less impact.

What do all of you think?

Shawn
 

After all, your audience wants to know about more than just the one problem. My take on it is that you should just go with a single POV character that is interesting to you, that you find realistic. There will naturally be several levels to the events that happen to such a character. On the one hand, this action serves a primary goal, on the other, it sets back a secondary goal. Perhaps various goals are conflicting, so the primary goal is really to figure out what the foremost goal is (I once made a new year's resolution to have a resolution by the next week).

Single POV doesn't mean there are no subplots, our own, inherently single POV experiences are full of interesting subplots, several of which may vie for center stage in our lives at any given time. And this is interesting to us, enough so that we endure utterly stupid amounts of crap to be allowed to go on living (okay, there's also some kind of instinctive imperitive operating at a subrational level, but I'll just gloss that for now).

When we say that there are multiple plotlines, I think of that as meaning plotlines that are only tangentially or coincidentally linked, as in "these people all know each other, or knew each other, even though they now have fallen out of touch," or "an element arising in this plotline has an effect on this other plotline, even though the two are not directly tied."

As I and others have said, we think this kind of thing is lame and is done solely for the purpose of creating thick books that have a plotline for each market segment. And the worst thing is that it's addictive. I haven't read any Jordon in a long time, not just because I find parts of his writing annoying, but because in one of his books he said nothing at all about a character that I was interested in. The thing is, if he had written the books as smaller, parallel stories, instead of a huge interwoven mess, I would never have stopped reading, and he would have sold four times as many books.

The simple answer?

Single POV, followed closely throughout. Main plot and subplots are the natural result of various competing motives and goals that any realistic character will have.
 

But, numberwise, I would say no more than like 4-5 story lines and that is a stretch for me to grasp. They usually have like 1. Good guys, 2. Bad guys, and 3. The other guys. Thats how most books go with multiple story lines alot of the time. Something like that.

Keeping the readers interesting is most important though, if you want them to finish the story.
 

I decided I would not limit points of view, so long as it served the plot. I am writing a tale about two ghosts who have been sent to hell for body possession. One of them was sent to a certain punishment (her point of view therefore necessary), another into administration of hell (his point of view therfore necessary). Meanwhile several events are happening on earth which come to bear on the ghost's impending jailbreak, therefore I added a policeman character who is investigating the strange circumstances of one of the ghost's death.
 

"policeman character who is investigating the strange circumstances of one of the ghost's death" should be recast either as "policeman character who is investigating the strange circumstances of one of the ghosts' deaths'" or "policeman character who is investigating the strange circumstances of (or surrounding) the death of one of the ghosts."

Was that not the most inane comment? I think that I've come up with worse, in the past.

I guess that I have nothing else to say, except to restate my preference for single POV.
 

Or, perhaps, "one of the deaths of the one of the ghosts."

And, of course, in the case of multiple deaths of multiple ghosts, we could have "one of the deaths of each of the ghosts" for which the phrase "one of the ghosts' deaths" is not an adequate paraphrase.

Hmmm...

I would like to see a detailed mapping of deaths to ghosts before we go much further here.

And I agree that single POV is easier to deal with for both the writer and the reader.

 

Back to an earlier question: I think multiple plotlines are just fine. I thrive on them. I find them far more interesting. It takes some skill to tie everything together at the right point in the story, but otherwise it is not that dangerous a practice, seems to me, for an author to pursue.