Storytelling 113: A-B Plots
Weaving Intercutting Narrative Threads into a Cohesive Tapestry
“Structure is the abiding obsession of Nolan’s films, the one truly intemperate taste he has: architectural structure, narrative structure, chronological structure, musical structure. Even psychology is a function of structure in Nolan’s films, his characters doubling and quadrupling like tessellations in an Escher print.”
—Tom Shone, The Nolan Variations
Syd Field, Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting:
“The exterior aspect of your character takes place during the actual time of the screenplay, from the first fade-in to the final fadeout. It is important to examine the relationships in the lives of your characters, as they have the potential of becoming a resource for greater depth of character, including subplots, secondary actions, and any possible intercutting you may want to do to build the relationship between characters and story.
How do you make your characters real, believable, and multidimensional people during your story? From fade-in to fade-out?
The best way to do this is to separate your characters' lives into three basic components — their professional life, their personal life, and their private life. These areas of your characters' lives can be dramatized over the course of the screenplay.”
—Syd Field, Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting
John Truby, The Anatomy of Story:
“Subplot Character:
The subplot character is one of the most misunderstood in fiction. Most writers think of this character as the lead in the second story line— for example, as the love interest in a detective story. But that is not a true subplot character.
The subplot character has a very precise function in a story, and again it involves the comparative method. The subplot is used to contrast how the hero and a second character deal with the same problem in slightly different ways. Through comparison, the subplot character highlights traits and dilemmas of the main character.
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The subplot character, like the ally and the opponent, provides another opportunity to define the hero through comparison and advance the plot. The ally helps the hero reach the main goal. The subplot character tracks a line parallel to the hero, with a different result.
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The subplot must affect the hero's main plot, or it shouldn't be present at all. If the subplot doesn't serve the main plot, you have two simultaneous stories that may be clinically interesting to the audience, but they make the main plot seem too long. To connect the subplot to the main plot, make sure the two dovetail neatly, usually near the end.
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Where we see true subplots most often is in love stories, which is a form that tends to have a thin main plot.
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A subplot is really a plot of its own, with its own structure. But it's a great technique. It improves the character, theme, and texture of your story. On the other hand, it slows the desire line — the narrative drive. So you have to decide what is most important to you.”
—John Truby, The Anatomy of Story
Books and literature are in decline.
Television, films, video games, social media, and myriad digital distractions compete for global attention against the slow, quiet choice to sit down and read a book.
In many respects, the general public is getting dumber than previous decades. Ignorance flourishes.
Shallow entertainment functions more as propaganda than as educational content. A narrow selection of history is endlessly promoted, relitigated, regurgitated, and mined for stories — slavery, the Holocaust, Civil Rights, World Wars One and Two, and the eternal present.
We live in the infinite bubble of right-now… Now… NOW.
A myopic junkyard, devoid of useful insights.
The average American knows nothing about the Taiping Rebellion, one of the bloodiest civil wars in Chinese history, slaughtering more than twenty million victims. Average citizens remain ignorant in regards to an amazing spectrum of topics: the Boer Wars, the Umayyad Conquests, Ernest Shackleton’s polar expeditions, the manufacturing of Taiwan’s semiconductors — anything outside the Overton Window of modern propaganda, might as well have never happened.
No history exists outside of the Current Year.
Reading books threatens to become an aristocratic, class-based pursuit. Only children, NEETs, stay-at-home-wives, and a limited sampling of lucrative, white-collar careers possess the necessary leisure hours to sit down and enjoy a book, whether fiction or nonfiction.
Deeply horrified by the rise of an ignorant mainstream public, betrayed by promises of an Enlightened future tethered to the resplendent Information Age of cheap, accessible, ubiquitous computation, intellectuals tend to avoid these realizations.
Unfortunately, the trend towards parochial ignorance and trivial distractions has become undeniable.
A distracted, illiterate mainstream audience provides the current market demand.
And yet.
Every cloud has a silver lining.
There’s a curious paradox related to this trend of ignorance, distraction, and technological addiction.
Today’s mass audience is the most sophisticated aggregate group of media consumers to ever exist. Because they are besieged by a constant flood of advertisements and televised adventures, because casual viewers are saturated… deluged… waterboarded with an endless firehose of information, the audience has developed media pattern recognition, an instinctual mastery of narrative rhythms.
Ordinary consumers of television, film, and the Internet are deeply familiar with story logic:
Viewers anticipate the timing of a commercial break.
They predict plot twists, and dramatic reveals.
Fans instantly recognize that cutting to black-and-white cinema indicates a flashback.
Market research firms have reported that the average consumer is exposed to somewhere between 5,000 to 10,000 advertisements per day.
That number seems suspiciously high… It's difficult to believe this frequency is a genuine reflection of the median citizen’s experience. Nevertheless, the data is clear: the modern world is cluttered by information, signals, and sales messages. Importantly, advertisements tend to adhere to a strict narrative structure: introduction of a concept or problem, escalation of tension, a narrative twist or dramatic complication, rapidly culminating in the catharsis of a satisfying emotional resolution tied to a moral parable. The moral of an advertisement is always a call to action: You must buy our product.
No matter how much this setup might vary, the essential punchline never changes.
Again and again, this pattern repeats.
Televised advertisements mechanically hammer the same points, the same messages, the same delivery and surprises.
Audiences have internalized the baseline rhythm of vanilla narrative structure: introduction, escalation, complication, and then a final resolution. The most casual fans are deeply immersed in cinema’s protocols.
For storytellers, the sophistication of the modern audience, and their familiarity with dramatic conventions, presents a serious challenge to construction of fun, thought-provoking entertainment.
How can artists and auteurs deliver an entertaining story, without the element of surprise?
How can storytellers disorient, discombobulate, and delight an audience which is capable of anticipating, unpuzzling, and identifying key mysteries embedded into the narrative’s skeleton, which are essential to the drama’s goal of emotional resonance?
One popular solution to this problem is to be WEIRD, to combine bizarre arrangements of familiar story elements into an unfamiliar ensemble. Postmodern structure, nonlinear storytelling, unreliable narrators — all of these techniques can succeed, and do succeed, when executed properly.
But completely abandoning traditional storytelling is a mistake. Classic myths, parables, and fairy tales are beloved entertainment staples for good reasons.
The biggest danger is that authors will attempt to confuse the audience, and instead confuse themselves, by building their stories with advanced, unconventional techniques they are unprepared to skillfully implement.
Traditional storytelling plays an important role.
Every writer should learn how to tell a story designed around conventional, vanilla structure. Rigid pacing retains suspense, and dramatic momentum. In many respects, the classic formats are optimal, constructed with pure, streamlined efficiency so that only essential functions remain, and this same optimization is the precise reason their patterns are endlessly studied, mimicked, and repeated — because a reliable pattern performs smoothly, unencumbered by elaborate inefficiencies; embellishments; ornamentation which serves to misdirect the audience.
Basic narrative structure remains solid. Although derivative, the format hits like a sledgehammer.
Perhaps the best accommodation to this contemporary state of affairs, which retains the classic benefits of an efficient and straightforward narrative design, while adding some minor elements of complexity and suspenseful unpredictability, is for writers to weave together multiple synergistic plotlines… crafting a fluid, cohesive tapestry.
Intercutting plots and subplots combine simplified, prosaic components to deliver a more complex, eccentric final product.
This aesthetic technique is usually labeled as A-B storytelling (which refers to a dual plot structure), or A, B, C storytelling (which refers to a primary plot, secondary subplot, and a peripheral, tertiary series of scenes).
Layering simple patterns together results in breathtaking, exponential complexity.
Characters, themes, plots, and emotions intensify.
Subplots can interact in an astonishing multitude of mechanisms and procedures. We might compare these combinations to the basic elements of the Periodic Table, which blend together in a near-infinite assortment of chemical compounds.
Theoretically, a story can infinitely splinter into A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H plots and subplots.
In practical terms, adding subplots brings diminishing returns. Audiences can only focus on one viewpoint at a time.
A 22-page comic, or an 18-minute sitcom episode, is forced to carefully budget time given to any scene. Every storyline must be explored, then resolved. Two or three storylines is generally good enough to carry a narrative.
Rotating through plots and subplots can accomplish intriguing dramatic effects.
Thousands of aesthetic and emotional possibilities open up by allowing the main plot to interact with less significant plots, and subplots, which are then able to comment upon, elaborate, accentuate, recapitulate, critique, mirror, deconstruct, expand, or undermine the primary narrative thread. A vast new world materializes. Exotic and potent expressions. Almost a new language of semantic, semiotic, and structural tools present themselves to the diligent artist. Drama is heightened… darkened… deepened… transformed into a better, more beautiful art form. The full range of aesthetic options which are provided by this One Simple Trick™ are too numerous to exhaustively catalog — what’s productive is to instead analyze the emotional mechanisms of how the play, and interplay of layered, intercutting dramatic structure might potentially impact an audience.
A-B plots are designed to achieve any of five core purposes:
1.) reveal character
2.) advance plot
3.) heighten suspense
4.) stimulate audience’s emotions
5.) advocate moral, philosophical theme
We might observe these five ambitions are the fundamental intentions of any narrative.
One of the basic rules of storytelling is that A + B = C.
In other words, the author presents a pair of data points, and from surveying this pair of facts (which may be reliable or unreliable sources of information), the audience is able to extrapolate, and to logically deduce an inference which constructs a larger, more colorful worldview. This process of observation, contemplation, analysis, and extrapolation is the most rudimentary, most elemental summary of how audiences perceive and then emotionally connect with entertainment.
Some fundamental assumptions of this process include:
The author “plays fair” — narratives adhere to a consistent internal logic. No matter how fantastical the magic or science fiction might be, whether there are demons or vampires or teleportation or invisible time travelers, stories must take their own rules seriously. Even unreliable narrators and dishonest information must adhere to unspoken rules. Fiction is a game played between the author and the audience. The author is not allowed to cheat. Audiences rarely guess the story’s hidden emotional payoffs during the initial consumption of a media product, but in retrospect, during subsequent rereads, audience members should be able to identify clues and hints which foreshadowed eventual climaxes.
There is an ideal ratio of information revealed, concealed, distorted, and deceived. As the narrative progresses, this ratio is constantly shifting — but the mathematical ratio of what the audience knows, versus what the audience does not know, must remain within certain optimized parameters. If the audience knows too much, they are able to predict everything that happens, which causes boredom, and the audience tunes out of the movie or closes the book. If the audience doesn’t know enough, they become disoriented and confused, which causes frustration, and so again the audience tunes out of the movie or closes the book. Always storytellers must deliver a proper mixture of epiphany and mystique. Secrets and riddles are fun, but they must balance with answers and insights. One simple rule: during the first half of the book, every time a mystery or puzzle is solved, two more mysteries should be planted and teased. Suspense builds. During the second half of a book, as the narrative races towards the conclusion, the mathematical equation should reverse. Inversion demands that during the second half of a book, for every two mysteries or puzzles that are solved, one additional mystery should be planted and teased.
Audiences enjoy inferences. Guessing and speculating is part of the fun. Therefore, gaps and blank spaces should indicate the absence of information. Blatant denials of data empowers the audience with a brief window to play with their own imagination, and to enjoy the process of speculating. But again, the author must always provide a satisfying resolution to any mystery.
Switching between viewpoint characters tends to create interstitial voids, which are implied, offscreen areas, events, characters, and problems. The scale and scope of a narrative explodes. Offscreen events build suspense and intrigue audiences, although too much happening offstage has a tendency to expand out of control.
Choosing the sequence that information is presented to the audience is every bit as important as the story’s actual content. Designing a mystery is fundamentally about creating a neat, orderly narrative, and then fragmenting and choreographing the components into a chaotic, disorderly puzzle, which will create fascination based on an unspoken promise, an unspoken contract between the author and audience, that eventually this chaos will be resolved into a semblance of order which asserts a moral or philosophical truth.
To escape from these abstract considerations, let’s consider practical application of A-B plots.
The most archetypal example of an A-B plot combination is to put two heroes in a pair of impossible situations, then resolve the narrative climax by allowing each hero to solve the other character’s crisis.
For example, consider a hypothetical storyline:
A rich businessman is being extorted by a gangster who kidnapped his wife and kids. This happens in the same world that an impoverished veteran of the American military falls behind in his mortgage payments, and realizes he is in danger of losing his house to the local bank. Both men feel hopeless. Each man has his own formidable skillset, his own customized strengths: one man is rich but physically weak. The other man is dangerous but lacks a stable income. The first half of the narrative explores their struggles, and proceeds as problems escalate with urgency and intensity. Near the end of the storyline, both men resign themselves to catastrophe, and they travel to a bar, to drink away their sorrows. By strange and unexpected coincidence, the two men sit down at the bar beside each other, and confess their anxieties. A miracle occurs! The businessman hires the soldier to rescue his wife and kids from the gangster, in return for paying the soldier’s mortgage (spending money which otherwise would’ve been sent to the kidnappers as a ransom payment). The rescue operation succeeds, the soldier kills the kidnappers, the businessman is reunited with his beloved wife and children, and two men cement a powerful new friendship.
It’s a simple, powerful, and satisfying storyline.
The solution for each story is hidden in the other plotline. Some readers may anticipate this ending, and the author’s job is to deliver an entertaining denouement. But most readers won’t expect the climax, and will find this resolution cathartic.
We can consider a triangle of A-B-C plots, which functions in the same manner.
Consider a story of money, sex, and power.
A rich banker discovers he is being cheated on by an unfaithful wife. A soldier struggles to pay his gambling debts. A dating coach is hunted by a jealous husband.
Paper-scissors-rock.
Each man is able to solve the other man’s problems. Each edge of the triangle contributes a key skill needed by another character, but is unable to resolve his own crisis. The banker needs advice from the dating coach, to learn how to romance and seduce women, and to overcome his fears of sexual betrayal. The dating coach needs protection from the soldier. The soldier needs a loan from the banker.
This is a less satisfying story than the previous narrative. The structure is more sloppy and clumsy. But the general technique should be obvious.
There’s a musical sensibility to curating plots and subplots, choosing storylines which serve as melodies, harmonies, or dissonant counterpoints in relation to each other. How the stories add, subtract, or multiply together is just as important as their individual narrative concerns.
Any long-form narrative demands the inclusion of subplots; this is a pivotal skill any professional writer should eventually master.
One of the most famous examples of A-B storytelling is David Chase’s The Sopranos: Season One, Episode Five: “College”, when Tony Soprano brings his daughter Meadow on a tour of prospective colleges. During this father-daughter expedition, Tony Soprano stumbles across a forgotten associate, a Mafia gangster who betrayed his family and testified as an FBI criminal informant, then relocated and adopted a new identity in the witness protection program.
Here, the A-story is that Tony Soprano and his daughter are touring colleges, preparing Meadow for her future career.
The B-story is that Tony Soprano is hunting and murdering the FBI snitch.
The C-story is that Tony’s wife, Carmela Soprano, is considering adultery with her Catholic priest, and they spend the night together watching movies.
My favorite aspect of this episode is the contrast between the A-story and B-story, which illustrates the contradictions of Tony Soprano — he is simultaneously an affectionate father and a hardened criminal. Alone in the car with Meadow, Tony Soprano denies that he is a criminal, and denies that the Mafia exists. He craves his daughter’s admiration, trust, loyalty, and tenderness. But at the same time, Tony Soprano strangles a stranger with a hurriedly improvised murder, and he laughs with sadistic glee as he chokes his victim with a garrote. It’s a cruel, brutal killing.
A + B = C.
Audiences witness psychological complexity, and realize that Tony Soprano is both a father and a gangster. He is a different person in each separate relationship.
Neither storyline is able to say as much by itself as they communicate together, in concert.
There’s a musical sensibility here: a distinctive synergy between melody, and counterpoint.
Endless combinations are possible if you learn how to blend together simple, functional storylines into more complex, vibrant products.
A prosaic summary of the mechanics of A-B storytelling is available here: