You're writing fiction. So why does it feel like lying?
When I was 19, I started writing a novel. I finished it at the age of 22. It was a 1,400-page novel. High fantasy. Exquisite concepts. Original world building. I had learned so much about the craft of writing and I put all of it into practice. The result? My first novel was dogshit.
Back then I didn't have the maturity to understand why it didn't work. I sent it to every publishing house in the country and to some across the world and received so many rejections. I was so hurt and couldn't understand why people were shitting on my novel using exotic adjectives. (What ever happened to sending in a canned response for rejections.)
And then, from ages 22 to 34, I wrote the first 5 or 10 chapters of many different novels each year. I couldn't finish any of them because they didn’t feel real. Something wasn't working. I had great world-building and original ideas, but every time I wrote the first 5 or 10 chapters, the characters didn't feel fully alive and plausible. They didn't feel real enough, and their goals didn't feel real enough. The plot felt contrived. The human in me could not accept those stories and would stop at chapter 5 or 7 or 10.
I tried using proven plot formats, like the 7-point format or the 3-act format. Regardless of how many times I tried, nothing worked. For ten years, I would write a new novel every year, and at the tenth chapter I would just abandon it because it was it didn't feel real. I always felt like something was terribly wrong with it. My gut wouldn’t let me proceed. I felt like I was lying on the page, which is strange, because I was writing fiction.
And then a couple of years back I went to the Bangalore Writers' Workshop and there they taught me about something called subtext. They told me that subtext is a critical component in writing good stories. I didn't pay proper attention in class. I understood what the definition of subtext was but for years I never did anything about it.
Now I realize that SUBTEXT is the most important starting point for your story if you want to write a short story or a book or craft an advertisement or conceptualize a marketing campaign. You shouldn't even write a sentence without figuring out your subtext.
Let me explain what it is and how to use it. Because if you can crack subtext, you're going to write many amazing short stories and books and they're going to flow so naturally, and your readers are going to love them.
Have you seen the movie Chef? The one with Jon Favreau in it. If you go and watch that movie again you'll notice that it feels incredibly real. Something about a man quitting his job in a restaurant to go and make sandwiches feels authentic and honest. It strikes a chord; the human in you is able to connect so strongly with Jon Favreau's character as he quits his job, sets out to start a food truck and begins to make food that makes him happy again.
Why does that feel so real? Well to understand that we have to go back in time, in Jon Favreau's old life, and understand who the guy was and what this movie means.
Jon Favreau started out as an indie filmmaker, made a couple of really budget films which got a lot of attention and were really raw and real and well done.
Fast forward to 2008 - at the time, Marvel was an independent studio, not yet an empire. They gave him Iron Man. At the time, nobody had huge expectations. Marvel was a relatively small operation, Iron Man wasn't their biggest character, and there was no cinematic universe yet to protect. So Favreau got something rare: time and freedom. Jon had the creative freedom to do whatever he wanted, which is why the first Iron Man movie feels so amazing, original, refreshing, and real. It does not feel formulaic, It does so many brilliant things and it's very imaginative.
If you look at the second Iron Man movie, which was also made by Jon, it feels formulaic. Why? Because it was micromanaged by the studio and they wanted him to follow a format. It feels very formulaic and very crap. When I saw it I couldn't understand what wasn't working but I felt like it had lost the magic that I saw in the first movie. They were looking at it from the view of a balance sheet instead of looking at it as a film. Jon was not allowed to do what he wanted and it really stifled his creativity, Then came Iron Man 2. By this point Marvel knew what they had, and the machine kicked in. Scripting demands. Casting demands. A brutal production timeline that Favreau later said forced him and the entire crew to go into overdrive (people weren't sleeping, apparently). The balance sheet had replaced the whiteboard, and you’ll easily notice it when you see Ironman 2. Eventually he'd had enough. He went away and wrote Chef in three weeks. Eleven million dollar budget (a fraction of what he'd been working with just months ago). He said in interviews: "I really missed that experience, so I gave myself permission to do this." Permission, said a guy who'd just directed one of the biggest franchises in Hollywood history and helped kick-start the empire that would be Marvel. If you pay attention you'll notice that the story of Chef (2014) mirrors the story of Jon's real life. In Jon's real life he isn't allowed to be creative, take risks, experiment, and make movies that feel authentic to him. The studios don't allow him to. In the movie Chef the chef's boss, who is the restaurant owner, does not allow the chef to make experiments and try new things. He is really concerned about the bottom line and so he forces him to make a really safe menu and cook very safe dishes, which kills his creativity and makes him want to stop cooking.
That's the emotional truth underneath the whole movie. When you're young and you join a job and you're idealistic and you want to do great things and be creative and bring in real results, you realize after a couple of years that the job will not let you do that. Most companies have an agenda. Your boss has an agenda and they want to play it safe and get decent results. You can't be the creative genius that you want to be at work and it stifles your creativity. It's exhausting. It's suffocating and it makes you want to go and buy an acre of land in Ram Nagara outside Bangalore, 40 km away, and start a farm and grow produce and show the corporate world the middle finger.
That is the emotional truth that Jon Favreau is trying to show us in Chef. It's what he felt in his life when he was making movies with big studios. It's what his character was feeling in the movie Chef and it's what you're feeling at work every day. Eventually you resign to the fact that, okay, this is just a job. I'm going to do it and I'm going to keep my job so that I can make money for myself and my family and I'm not going to get emotional about it, A lot of us resign and that is why we are all able to watch that movie Chef and find it so relatable, so authentic, so emotionally powerful, It's not because you don't like Chef because he quits his job to make sandwiches because he's God and a really hot ex and an even hotter girlfriend. That's not why you like Chef. You like Chef because of the emotional truth that the story is based on and that is subtext.
How do you use subtext when you write a story or a book? Very simple. There are a lot of things that are happening to you as a person on a daily basis. A lot of truths that you realize as you grow older and as you interface with the world and as you try to accomplish your personal goals in relationships and as you try to accomplish things in the professional world. You start to realize things. It's about taking those truths that you realize that you come across and then fitting them beautifully into a story.
Let me give you an example of what a truth feels like. A very simple example of a good truth is that when you live away from your family, from your parents, you often miss them very, very, very badly. For a lot of my friends even though they missed their family and their parents very badly when they go back home to stay with them for a week, they fucking hate it. Within two or three days the honeymoon period of that trip is over and your parents are trying to micro-manage you, control you. You realize that your preferences and way of living life don't match with theirs. There are a lot of these little micro-conflicts. There's a lot of micro-stressors. Suddenly you're shouting at them. Suddenly they're shouting at you and a lot of things that you disagree on in principle all show up. Five days into this trip you're wondering why the fuck you miss your family? They are still your family and you love them. It's complicated. It's messy but that's the truth and that, my friend, is an example of a simple truth.
If you take this and roll it into a short story, the characters will feel authentic. The story will flow and have a nice start, a very relatable middle, and a very organic conclusion.
Here are some examples of subtext from a bunch of other stories:
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. Roy grew up in Kerala, watched her community's caste dynamics up close, and the book's subtext — that love crosses lines society draws, and society punishes you brutally for it — came directly from things she witnessed and felt.
8 Mile. Eminem made a "fictional" film that is essentially his life story with the names changed. The subtext — proving yourself to people who've written you off, in a world that gives you no structural advantages — is so raw and present that it barely qualifies as subtext anymore. Good contrast to Favreau because it shows subtext at its most naked.
And here’s one tip on how to position subtext. I’ll borrow from Hemingway's Iceberg Theory. He said the dignity of an iceberg comes from seven-eighths of it being underwater. Applied to fiction: the emotional truth powering a story doesn't need to be stated. It just needs to be there, underneath everything. The reader feels it without seeing it.
And here’s one more tip on how to deliver subtext. Andrew Stanton, the Pixar director who made Wall-E and Finding Nemo, has a principle that takes Hemingway's idea one step further. He says: don't give the audience 4. Give them 2+2. Meaning, don't state the emotion. Don't explain what the scene means. Lay down the ingredients and let the reader feel their way to the conclusion themselves. The act of arriving there is what makes it land. The moment you spell it out, you've robbed them of it. That's subtext as a delivery mechanism, the truth is there, but the reader has to close the gap, and closing that gap is exactly what makes a story feel alive rather than written.
I can’t conclude this blog post without a lesson from Casey Neitsat. When Nike gave him a budget to make an ad, he blew it all traveling the world instead. The resulting video (search for 'Make it count' on YouTube), which shows him living fully, not selling shoes, became one of the most watched ads in internet history. He's said he only makes things he'd make for free. The stuff born from genuine feeling. Because audiences, he believes, can always tell the difference between something made because it was true and something made because it was assigned.
Subtext is important. I wish I'd learned this 12 years back. Think of any video essay, novel, short story, or YouTube video that you like, there’s a good chance it is built on the back of strong subtext.
Tl;dr: Please start writing your stories after figuring out your truth (your subtext), and it will feel real and engage your reader thoroughly. I wish you luck, energy and good fortune on the paper.