{"id":3844,"date":"2012-07-13T06:00:55","date_gmt":"2012-07-13T11:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/?p=3844"},"modified":"2012-07-13T06:00:55","modified_gmt":"2012-07-13T11:00:55","slug":"counting-down-from-dee-to-aay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/?p=3844","title":{"rendered":"Counting Down from Dee to Aay"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Each team member gets their turn at Magneto. How they get there is a subplot. Art by John Byrne. Image Attribution<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When I was growing up Chris Claremont and John Byrne (with Terry Austin, Glynis Wein and my favorite letterer EVER Tom Orzechowski) were taking comic books to new levels that are taken for granted now. Their run on Uncanny X-Men<\/em> from 1977 – 1981 shaped how comics are made forever. What did they do? They built up anticipation with subplots that would run over the course of several issues as a \u2018D\u2019 or \u2018C\u2019 story of a couple of panels or one page or so and then graduate it to a \u2018B\u2019 story for a couple of issues before it became the \u2018A\u2019 story. The one featured on the cover.<\/p>\n

It was classic soap opera storytelling but it was NEW. Well, not absolutely new, but they did it in a way that was so fresh it appeared new. I suspect they learned it from what Paul Levitz was doing as he was writing his classic Legion of Superheroes<\/em> runs and he did the same thing. Anyway, that\u2019s enough about comics for the nonce. (I always wanted to use \u2018nonce\u2019 in a blog post. Check that one off my list.)<\/p>\n

This is what influenced me in storytelling, these amazing comics that took me places I\u2019d never been before, told me stories in ways I hadn\u2019t seen before. That particular run, Uncanny<\/em> 108 to 143, made me want to make comics. I wanted to draw like Byrne (with Austin) and write with the style of Claremont but I didn\u2019t know how. I didn\u2019t know what to do. It took me years to realize there was a secret I hadn\u2019t picked up on and even then I wasn\u2019t sure how to go about discovering it.<\/p>\n

I realized I would have to deconstruct the stories when I saw mention of \u201cThe Levitz Paradigm\u201d in a book about writing comics by another great comic book writer, Denny O\u2019Neill. It\u2019s a simple grid that a writer uses to track the stories from \u2018D\u2019 to \u2018A\u2019 across several issues of a series. I applied that retroactively to the X-Men<\/em> comics and I figured out how to subplot.<\/p>\n

It turns out it works for novels and interconnected short stories, too.<\/p>\n

Subplots are important for building up your story. Not padding it out, that\u2019s not what I mean. Don\u2019t do that because that\u2019s bad writing. Anytime you\u2019re padding you\u2019re cheating and the reader can tell. Trust me. You can\u2019t fool \u2018em so don\u2019t try.<\/p>\n

No, if you can have two subplots that resolve before the climax of your novel-length story you\u2019ll win the readers because you cared enough to invest in more than one character. If you\u2019re writing short stories, use things in the background that can graduate to their own stories eventually.<\/p>\n

How do you do this? Well, you have to plan for it. You can\u2019t just throw some stuff down and pretend that you meant it to be that way all along. That\u2019s a cheat, too, and you\u2019ll get caught out. No, you\u2019ll have to invest some time in this. Think it through. Be proactive if that\u2019s what you want to do. (To be fair, sometimes it works out that way but a writer should never depend on it.)<\/p>\n

What a subplot does is simple: it gives the writer some breathing room and allows the reader to reset when the action of the main story is becoming intense. It distracts the writer as well and keeps the story fresh for him as he\u2019s pounding away at the keyboard. It\u2019s my belief that a subplot doesn\u2019t have to necessarily be shown. It can be in the background, mentioned by supporting characters or media devices. I\u2019m talking about things like news stories or natural disasters or a character\u2019s unseen lover. The trick to using those things is to not fall into the cliche.<\/p>\n

So. Subplots. I use them but not as effectively as I need to. It\u2019s something I\u2019m working on for the next novel, though. Thank you, Claremont, Byrne, and Levitz (et al) for giving me something in my childhood that I would use in my adult life for only thirty cents a month. That\u2019s a bargain. The best I ever had.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I was growing up Chris Claremont and John Byrne (with Terry Austin, Glynis Wein and my favorite letterer EVER Tom Orzechowski) were taking comic books to new levels that are taken for granted now. Their run on Uncanny X-Men from 1977 – 1981 shaped how comics are made forever. What did they do? They […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[207,619,1087,1196],"class_list":["post-3844","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mechanics","tag-comics","tag-legion-of-superheroes","tag-subplots","tag-uncanny-x-men"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3844","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3844"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3844\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}