Writing Synopses and Subplots with Intention

Best Practices for Developing Pitches and Subplots

It’s time for February’s AMA! Here are this month’s questions:

1. What are your thoughts on Save the Cat? How can this plot structure help writers?

2. What is a subplot? Can the main storyline and the subplot have the same protagonist?

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Welcome to Craft with Kat. At the end of every month, I round up your questions from the comment section and answer them in a post. You can ask me questions about anything from writing craft and the business of writing to professional and personal development. I also take content requests! If there’s a craft topic you want to see discussed, comment below to let me know.

February 2023 AMA

1. What are your thoughts on Save the Cat? How can this plot structure help writers?

My desk at my day job

I am such a strong believer in the Save the Cat structure that I have this chart taped to my desk at work. The first thing I do when I write something new for the games I’m working on is consult this chart. I love this structure because it helps me accomplish two things effectively:

1. Outline the narrative from a bird’s eye view

   1. In our first free craft lesson, we break down Greek Dramatic Structure (GDS) and how Save the Cat’s beats can help you discover your story.

2. Create sales materials for my story (loglines, one-paragraph summaries, synopses, etc.)'

A big-picture outline is crucial to my writing process because it helps me see where I’ll run into problems before I spend hours and hours writing 20,000 words. The problems I face are almost always the result of underdeveloped character goals or a weak person vs. person force of antagonism. GDS, when combined with the Save the Cat beats, helps me know exactly when I need to further flesh out my characters’ goals or my force of antagonism. It’s also important to note that plot doesn’t come naturally to me. If I don’t use this outline, I’ll end up writing 300 pages of a boring story where nothing happens.

In addition to outlining, understanding your story within the context of Save the Cat can make writing sales materials for your book so much easier. If you know exactly what your inciting incident, break into II, and midpoint beats are, it’s much easier to write a concise and compelling summary of your 250+ page novel in ~175 words. 

Along with simplifying the one-paragraph summary, Save the Cat will also help you write a 1-2 page synopsis of the novel’s entire plot. Over the years, I’ve had to submit this type of detailed synopsis to several MFA and summer workshops. I also had to write a synopsis like this when I received a revise and resubmit request from a major publisher. In addition to that, there were also a handful of agents that I queried who requested a full plot synopsis. This synopsis is—by far—the most difficult document for me to write. 

Writing a full synopsis is difficult for me because the document is essentially asking you to demonstrate the cause and effect of the events in your novel. I don’t know about y'all, but it's incredibly difficult for me to see the cause and effect in my own work, let alone summarize it in two pages. But the beats of Save the Cat help me peel back the outer layers of my story and find the core events that need to be summarized. On top of that, Save the Cat Writes a Novel has several synopses from different genres that you can reference as examples.

If you’d like to see a craft lesson on writing a full plot synopsis, let me know in the comments!

While I love Save the Cat for writing big-picture outlines and sales materials, I don’t find it all that helpful for chapter-level outlining or really drafting a novel in general. For instance, this structure doesn’t have enough detail to help me solve typical Act II problems that cause the dreaded “soggy middle.” For this reason, I recommend The Story Solution if you’re looking to structure a long work like a novel or a feature-length screenplay. If you’re writing short stories though, I use Save the Cat and GDS to outline my work.

2. What is a subplot? Can the main plot and the subplot have the same protagonist?

This is an excellent question. Subplots are kind of mysterious because they can naturally arise from character relationships or the circumstances of the story. I only recently learned how to write subplots with intention myself, so I’m excited to break them down now.

Let’s start with a basic definition:

Subplot: A secondary or tertiary storyline that is connected to the central story through a character’s relationships or their external goals.

With this definition in mind, the answer to the question is yes, the subplot’s protagonist can also be the main protagonist of the story. While there are a lot of possibilities for a subplot, the most common subplots are love stories that develop the protagonist’s relationship with the love interest and training sequences that develop the protagonist’s relationship with a mentor.

For me, it’s most helpful to think of a subplot as a means to teach the protagonist the theme of the story in a different aspect of their life.

In our lesson on conflict and antagonism, we discussed how to establish a protagonist’s ordinary world. The first guiding question in the lesson asks: What does the protagonist’s family, work, and social life look like before the start of the story?

An important follow up question to this is: How is the protagonist dissatisfied with their family life, their work life, and their social life?

While this statement will be an oversimplification, a effective story can generally be boiled down to two parts: