Writer's Blog: Writing a Nover - More Sub-plot Symbolism

This will be a quick run through of the remaining questions of Chapter 4 of Writing A Novel.

There are five more questions in this section.(Pages 46 & 47)

In the interest of expedience I'm going to skip over question 3. It asks about unwitting symbolic elements to the story and I don't feel I've much to say on that.

Question four is far more interesting. It gives three one line synopses of a story and then asks for thoughts on sub-plots. In brackets are the possible themes of the stories. I'm just going to look at one of them.

'An out-of-work actor impersonates a woman to get work, and becomes a soap-opera star (men are very different from women).' (P47)

Now I would say that if this is your story its probable going to be a comedy. (Though it would be interesting to see this as a serious story.) So that gives ideas of sub-plot. In this type of story the secret would be a big issue. A gay woman could fall for him, believing the disguise, or perhaps a gay man falls for him not believing the disguise - and all the while the poor out-of-actor is in love with the young casting director who may fire him if she finds out his secret.

As odd as it may sound I almost want to write that story now.

The last three questions are all about names. The name of the novel and the names of the characters. What is being emphasised here is that a different name can have a different influence on how the character is viewed. This is a personal thing. If, for instance, you were bullied for years by someone called Alex - then it is doubtful that you would name a character this. So the name of a character will never be right for everyone - just try and make sure it sounds right to you and isn't accidentally the same name as a, either fictional or real, famous person.