Managing Multiple Storylines
Making Plots, Subplots Work Together
By Julie Tollefson
Joshua Moehling’s Ben Packard series juggles multiple storylines, addresses some of the biggest issues of the day, and wraps them all up in a satisfying package that keeps readers coming back for more. The first book in the series, And There He Kept Her, was a Barnes & Noble monthly mystery/thriller pick and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBTQ+ Mystery. Here, Joshua offers five tips for weaving a multi-layered, compelling story.
1) Seek balance — The third book in Joshua’s Ben Packard series, A Long Time Gone, is out now and tackles a mystery that has haunted the series protagonist for decades: what happened to his brother, who disappeared when Packard was a child.
“I knew going into this book that it was time to answer the question of what happened to Ben Packard’s brother all those years ago,” Joshua says. “I also felt like that story wasn’t enough to carry the entire novel.”
Joshua structured the book around a central crime and then looked for ways to intertwine the old and new cases.
"I wouldn’t call myself a pantser or a plotter," he says. "I think about a book for a long time before I start writing. I knew the main beats of both stories but I wasn’t working from an outline as I wrote the book. Balance was really important to me. We’ve been waiting for three books to find out what happened to Nick, and I didn’t want the answer to feel like an epilogue. I let the story roam as I wrote it, then worked to find the balance in the editing."
2) Trust your instincts — Sometimes, it takes time to find your way in a book. Listen to your gut and don’t be afraid to change directions, even when you’re well under way.
“I didn’t know until almost a third of the way through the book that Packard was going to be involved in a shooting while on duty,” Joshua says of A Long Time Gone. “As soon as I wrote that chapter, I realized it needed to move to the front. The book opens with the shooting and it sets the tone for everything that comes after.”
The addition meant Joshua now had three threads to weave throughout the novel: Packard’s missing brother, the suspicious death of Louise Larsen, and the shooting.
“Moving the shooting to the front required a fair amount of rewriting but it solved more problems than it created. It complicated Packard’s situation at work, it impacted him mentally, and all of that helped create more conflict in the story,” he says.
3) Be true to your character, wherever that leads —Joshua’s first novel went out on submission in the summer of 2020, an unsettled time when COVID wreaked havoc and the death of a Black man at the hands of a white cop in Joshua's hometown of Minneapolis sparked global protests against police brutality.
“I had a meeting with an editor three weeks after George Floyd was murdered who told me it wasn’t a great time to try to sell a novel about a white cop from Minnesota,” Joshua says. “Minneapolis was still reeling from the fires and the protests as I was writing Where the Dead Sleep,” the second book in the series.
In writing the third book, Joshua felt it was time to reckon with the reality in which Ben Packard operated.
“I didn’t feel like I was being true to the character or the setting by not confronting what it’s like to work in law enforcement post-George Floyd,” he says. “In A Long Time Gone, I knew once Packard was involved in a shooting while on duty that he would struggle with his actions, the public perception of his actions, and how he felt about contributing to the narrative that police solve everything with guns.”
One of Joshua’s main goals is to show Packard grow over time, and the character's struggles in the third book provided ample opportunity to explore that growth.
“Change in people happens slowly, and one of the perks of writing a series is you can see that change take place over multiple books,” he says. “If Packard stays static, there’s little for readers to be invested in other than the whodunnit aspect of the story.”
4) Make secondary characters earn their keep — In the third installment of his series, Joshua needed Packard to “get out of his head” and see the truth of his brother’s disappearance from a bigger perspective than his own grief and need for closure. Enter Packard’s mom.
“Packard and his mom, Pam, couldn’t be more unalike,” he says. “They’ve responded to the trauma of losing Nick in totally different ways. I thought their disparate personalities could provide the opportunity for comic relief and also some frank conversations about family and memory and loss.”
Joshua is also always on the lookout for opportunities to keep Packard’s love life active. “I was writing a scene where Packard goes to Minneapolis to interview another cop about a missing woman. I was so bored by it until I had the idea that this wasn’t just a nameless police officer. It was someone Packard knew—intimately. Someone he ghosted a long time ago. Giving this character a backstory paid unexpected dividends that I hadn’t anticipated in the planning.”
5) Draft first, analyze later — The real work of the novel often begins after the first draft.
"How the storylines amplify each other is not an answer I always know before writing a book," Joshua says.
Those connections, crossovers, and complementary storylines that look effortless in a finished version belie the truth that getting to “effortless” requires a heavy lift in the revision and editing stage.
"One way to approach it is to look at how the external impacts the internal, which in turn impacts the external,” Joshua says. “How does what’s happening in the primary storyline affect your character mentally or emotionally, and how does that in turn change or influence how they respond to what’s happening in the subplot (or vice versa)?"
Joshua credits a smart writing partner (fellow Minnesota novelist Gretchen Anthony) and great editors whose feedback helped shape his work and bring everything to a satisfying conclusion.
“The ending had to answer questions that have been asked since the first book. The ending has a little bit of everything—a chase, gunshots, heartbreak, big emotions, and the promise of a new future for these characters,” he says. “I’m really happy with how things resolved.”