Tips for Multi-Story Ensemble Series and Soap Operas

Subplots

The least complex form of the Multi-Story Ensemble Series employs the use of subplots. Subplots are tales or stories drawn with less resolution than the principal story. They hinge on one of the principal story's characters other than the Main Character. This hinge character becomes the Main Character of the subplot story.

Subplots are never essential to the progression of the principal plot and only serve to more fully explore issues tangential to the principal story's argument. Tangent is a good word to use here, as it describes something that touches on yet does not interfere with something else.

Subplots may begin any time during the principal story, but should wrap up just before the principal climax, or just after in the denouement (author's proof).

Relationships of Subplots to Plot

Since subplots are essentially separate stories, they may or may not reflect the values and concerns of the principal story. This allows an author to complement or counterpoint the principal argument. Often a subplot becomes a parallel of the principal story in another storytelling context, broadening the scope of the principal argument by inference to include all similar situations. In contrast, the subplot may arrive at the opposite conclusion, suggesting the solution for one storytelling situation is not universally appropriate.

There can be as many subplots in a story as time allows. Each one, however, must hinge on a character that is essential to the principal story (as opposed to a character merely created for storytelling convenience). Each character can only head a single subplot, just as the Main Character of the principal story cannot carry any more subplots. However, the Main Character can (and often does) take part in a subplot as one of its objective characters.

Multi-Story Formats

Other than subplots, Multi-Story Series can contain several unrelated stories. In this case, there may be two or more independent sets of characters that never cross paths. Or an author may choose to interweave these independent stories so the characters come into contact, but only in an incidental way. In a sense, this form is a spatial anthology in which multiple stories are not told in succession but simultaneously.

Perhaps the most complex form of the Multi-Story Ensemble Series is when both subplots and separate stories are employed. Often, the subplots and the separate stories both use the principal story's characters as well as characters that do not come into play in the principal story.

Stretching Time

An overabundance of storytelling becomes difficult to finish within the limits of even a one-hour show. Therefore, single episodes can be treated more like acts with stories sometimes running over four or more episodes. Each episode might also contain subplots staggered in such a way that more than one may end or begin in the middle of another subplot which continues over several episodes.

Obviously, many cross-dynamics can be going on here. It is the author's job as storyteller to make sure the audience always is aware which story or subplot they are seeing and what the character's roles are in each context. This is essential, since no internal storyform controls all the independent stories. The connective tissue of storytelling holds them together.