Blooming freezing up London Monday night so when I got off the Tube I dashed into the first coffee shop I could see spare seats in, which just happened to be Patisserie Valerie. I had a latte, a tart, and did some writing for an hour….bliss 🙂

Ok, on to Monday nights session 🙂

We talked about having conflict in our stories, and the different forms of conflict there are. Internal, external, environmental, you know all this, right? And that posing a question, having a problem for your character to solve can carry the narrative all the way through your novel. That’s what makes up the plot….but what about sub plots?

I’m not sure I really understand sub plots. I mean, the general consensus is that sub plots are hard to pull off in first person…ok, I can kind of get that. And that when they are included in a 3rd person novel, that they feed into the main plot, but are independent to the main narrative.

Hmmmmm, I’m not sure I get it 😦

The only example that I knew that was given was My Fair Lady (Pygmalion) where Eliza’s father is getting married, and that would be a sub plot. Ok, well if that’s the case, my first draft of my WIP (But Not Forgotten) was all sub plot? Lol.

Help me out here guys? How would you define sub plot? Before tonight’s class I would have said it was something along the lines of, say, (sorry Jayne, your WIP was the only example I could think of) 4 women going on a cruise, and 1 of them is escaping an abusive husband. What happens to the other 3 women on board (one discovers she’s pregnant, one meets a bloke etc) are the sub plots, yeah? Or have I got that completely wrong? *groans*

Wow….this is the first lesson I’ve come away from being more confused after than I was before lol. On a lighter note, they have provided us with a rather nice Christmas Tree in our class room 🙂