B-Story
Quick answer: What a B-story is in fiction: the secondary plot line that carries theme and breathing room, how Austen ran one, and how to use it in short stories.
A B-story is a secondary plot line that runs alongside the main plot, usually carried by different characters or a different relationship, and usually holding the story's emotional or thematic argument. In other words, it is the smaller story the big story keeps checking in on. The A-story chases the goal; the B-story quietly explains why the goal matters.
The label comes from screenwriting and was popularised by Blake Snyder's plotting manual Save the Cat, but the structure it names is far older than film. Novelists have always braided a second line under the first. You will meet the term in outlining and in revision, whenever someone asks what the rest of your cast is doing while the protagonist is busy.
Jane and Bingley, quietly doing the theme's work
In Pride and Prejudice, the A-story is Elizabeth and Darcy: attraction, insult, misjudgement, reversal. The B-story is Jane and Bingley, a gentler courtship derailed not by pride but by persuasion and interference. Austen cuts to it at precise moments, and each visit reframes the main plot. Darcy's confession that he separated Bingley from Jane converts the B-story into the A-story's biggest obstacle, and his repair of that damage becomes the proof that he has changed.
That is the device working at full power: the second line is not decoration but evidence. Jane's stalled romance shows what Elizabeth's caution could cost, and its eventual success sets the standard of happiness the main couple must earn. Remove the B-story and the novel still has a plot, but it loses the instrument that measures the plot's meaning.
Why writers run a second line
A B-story gives a narrative rhythm. Cutting away from the main plot at a moment of tension creates suspension rather than delay, and returning to the A-story after a B-scene makes the main events land fresher. It also gives theme somewhere to live. Sermons die in the mouth of a protagonist mid-crisis, but a parallel relationship can dramatise the story's question without anyone announcing it.
The risks are dilution and drift. Every scene spent elsewhere is word count the main plot does not get, and a B-story that never touches the A-story reads as a stapled-on second manuscript. The cost of overuse is a reader who starts skimming to get back to the story they signed up for. If your beta readers can summarise your book without mentioning the B-story at all, it has drifted too far from the current.
Fitting a B-story into short fiction
In a short story you rarely have room for a full second plot, so shrink the B-story to a strand: a neighbour's failing marriage glimpsed in three beats, a sibling's phone calls, a subordinate character pursuing a small goal in the background. Give it a beginning, a turn, and an ending, even if each is only a sentence, and make its final beat collide with the protagonist's climax or echo it.
The trap is symmetry for its own sake. If the B-story mirrors the main plot exactly, beat for beat, readers feel the machinery and stop believing in the people. Aim for rhyme, not repetition: the second strand should answer the same thematic question differently, the way Jane's trusting patience answers Elizabeth's sharp scepticism.
B-story, subplot, and the braided novel
Subplot is the broader term for any secondary plot line; B-story is the screenwriting flavour of it, usually implying a relationship strand that carries theme and often the love interest. A double plot, as in much Victorian fiction, gives the two lines near-equal weight. A braided narrative goes further still, weaving several strands with no clear A-line at all.
Plot thread is the loosest of these terms, meaning any continuing line of cause and effect the reader tracks. In practice, editors use B-story when they want to talk about function, the strand that argues the theme and relieves the pressure, and subplot when they only mean position in the hierarchy. Knowing which job your second line performs tells you what to cut when the word count bites.
What poets can take from this
- Let the B-story intersect the main plot at least twice: once to complicate it, once to help resolve it.
- Give the B-story its own tiny arc with a beginning, a turn, and an end.
- Cut to the B-story at moments of A-plot tension, not at lulls, so the cutaway builds pressure.
- Use the B-story to say the theme so your protagonist never has to.
- If a B-scene neither reveals character nor moves either plot, fold it into another scene or delete it.
Try it yourself
Write a story about someone planning a wedding toast while, in the background, two caterers quietly fall out and reconcile. The toast must land differently because of something the narrator overhears from the caterers.
Questions
Is a B-story the same as a subplot?
Nearly. Subplot is the general term for any secondary plot; B-story is the screenwriting version, and it usually implies the strand that carries the theme or the central relationship. Every B-story is a subplot, but not every subplot earns the B-story label.
Does a short story need a B-story?
No. Many excellent short stories run a single line. Add a second strand only when the story's meaning needs a counterexample or the pacing needs somewhere to cut away to, and keep it to a few beats.
Where should a B-story begin and end?
Convention starts it shortly after the main plot is moving, often in the first quarter, and resolves it just before or during the climax. The useful rule is simpler: the B-story should never open before the A-story exists, and its ending should change how the main ending feels.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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