Is It a Subplot or Simply a Sidetrack? How to Tell If You Have Strayed Too Far in Your Novel

Sidetracks are interesting to you, but rarely to the reader

Photo by George Bakos on Unsplash

There’s a fine line between subplots and sidetracks. But not that fine that you can’t work out which is which. Sidetracks tend to be the domain of the pantser writer. You write and write and wander off down potentially interesting paths — after all, until you write the whole novel, it can be hard to tell what is worth keeping and what is mind doodling.

But that’s you, writing in order to find out what your story is and who your characters are. Most writers do this at some point, unless they’re keen/strict outliners who create detailed road maps. Pantsing can allow you to explore, to come up with new ideas that might not have emerged in an outline.

The challenge is to work out what is a real subplot — one that will deepen plot, characters and probably backstory — and one that is simply a meandering or dead-end path.

One way to work it out is to understand how subplots work with your main plot. They tend to complement, complicate or contrast. The most common involve your characters, and the classic is the romance subplot. Your protagonist falls in love along the way, and the romance provides a subplot that weaves in…