I've Figured Out My Main Plot And Subplots

After researching the history of the Night of the Long Knives, I documented all the main events in a chronological timeline. Then I put each event on a 3x5 index card as a potential scene, so I have this stack of "scene cards." But it's full of gaps, some weeks and months long, and taken together, the scene cards make the story still feel very skeletal and woefully insufficient.

I've been going through my scene cards to think about how to fill in the gaps, and how to weave the various events and characters together into a tight story. Tonight I spent some time going through the cards, and wanted to share with you some progress I feel really good about.

After reviewing and absorbing these cards for the third or fourth time, thinking about filling gaps, I started to get a sense of my main plot and my subplots. The Night of the Long Knives has so many fascinating stories to it, and so many competing agendas among so many institutions and figures, that I was feeling a bit overwhelmed about how to tell it all, and how to bring a sense of focus to the story, how to bring some deliberate, literary direction and a cohesive "story arc". Now I think I've got it, and I feel both excited and relieved, having experienced yet another moment of reassurance on this journey of moments that I might just be able to pull this off.

So here it is.

My Main Plot: This is the story of how Adolf Hitler kills his long-time friend, and beheads a significant organ of his own party, in order to win the political favor of the main power bases in Germany and thereby remove his last obstacle to claiming complete power in Germany.

I think this is a surprisingly interesting and chilling tale, because while we tend to think of Hitler as an all-powerful dictator who's already executed 6 million Jews, this story is about him in earlier days, as a politician still fighting on tenuous ground to realize his ambitions, and unlike 6 million Jews, which is very hard to get your mind around, this story shows his violence and evil in a very personal way, where we see how he is willing to sell out his own longest (if not best) friend, with hesitation but not remorse, in order to win the favor of others and achieve his ambitions. To see him do that, and to see him at the end of the book achieving complete dictatorial power in Germany as a result, I think that's a really disturbing thing to watch.

So with that as the primary story, my main subplots become more clear:

- Ernst Rohm (SA chief) – The story of how a crude and politically careless ex-soldier invites the fatal wrath of his friend and leader by overestimating himself, underestimating others, and repeatedly putting himself on the wrong side of life-and-death political struggles in a chaotic Germany.

- Generals von Fritsch, von Blomberg and von Reichenau – The story of how the leadership of a severely crippled military service politically outmaneuvers a much larger force, an accomplishment that enables it later to fully rearm and to regain its primacy across Germany and -- for a time -- across all of Europe.

- Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich (SS leaders) – How a devious pair of men, motivated by their raw ambition for power, obtained their self-serving objectives by carefully orchestrating a ruthless act of mass murder, and by making it convenient for their political master to support and authorize them to do so.

I admit, this story is still a pretty broad canvas, but the story feels much more manageable with this specific, cohesive structure in place. It helps me know what to emphasize, and what is minor.

Anyway, I'm feeling great about this development, and thought it worth mentioning on my blog.