The purpose of subtext in fiction—just like in life—is to add meaning to your story and to what is happening on the page. A novel devoted to the exploration of a romantic relationship (romance) therefore needs multiple layers of subtext to ensure that it adds as much meaning as possible. Subtext, then, becomes an author tool to help make your scenes and dialogues work harder for your story.

Dialogue: Subtext is most literally and commonly recognised to be everything characters are not saying in between what they are saying. Body language during the dialogue (like in life) gives away subtext—to the characters and the reader—and dialogue tags or inner dialogue can reveal the subtext for the reader but not the other character.

So for instance if your heroine is madly trying not to let on that she’s been thinking about the hero since their one night together a year ago you might exploit subtext like this:

Ingrid crossed her slim arms hard across her chest making herself into a human bullet. ‘You think I lie awake at night wondering what went wrong between us, Gabe?’

Strength had its downside. But he was a Marque and well-practiced at not reacting to sarcasm. He half-smiled. ‘I would be a fool to imagine that.’

And so it was official. His father was right; he was l’imbecile.

The heroine might be saying that she hasn’t given him much thought since  they last met but her body language tells us (and him) that she’s defensive  about it and therefore probably not being totally honest. That’s subtext.

Similarly, the hero’s half-smile tells us a lot about the next thing he says (‘I would be a fool to imagine that.’). In other words he had imagined that,  in his weaker moments, and despises that about himself. As humans and  readers we decode a half-smile as being deprecating, so it adds that tone to  what he’s actually saying out loud. Subtext.

And finally (just in case anyone missed the other clues), the hero’s internal dialogue adds confirmation that he was fool enough to think she’d been thinking of him (and some opportunistic backstory about his family relationship for good measure).

In this case the characters may not be heavily conscious of the subtext, but it does start to influence the meaning they take from conversations with each other.

Setting/Mise en scene: If a hero ends a relationship with the heroine over lunch in the middle of a work day it sends a totally different message to the one who breaks up with her the moment they wake the morning after she was chief bridesmaid at her best friend’s wedding. Subtextually, the bedroom setting and the fact she still has the bridesmaid dress hanging on the back of the door adds a whole lot of extra meaning (and ouch) to the breakup scene. And the reader becomes very conscious that no-one’s mentioning the wedding and so it’s probably relevant. So the reader gets a clue about the hero’s commitment issues before the (devastated) heroine thinks it through and long before he realises.

Internal/External conflict: many people say that the external conflict is what the characters believe is going on between them and the internal conflict is what’s *really* going on between them. That makes the entire internal conflict a kind of subtext. It’s the thing driving, changing, and affecting the story without either character (and possibly the reader, at first) knowing it’s there. And it may not be fully revealed/exposed until the resolution.

So the breaking up couple think they’re breaking up over the fact that she’s working for his competitor and he thinks she’s been leaking information (for instance) but what’s really going on is that he’s falling for her and is scared of his emotions because he came from a broken home. So all those traits and foibles can be a kind of subtext.

A story about relationships that doesn’t have any subtext going on would be pretty flat because our real relationships are saturated with subtext all the time and we are sensitive to it without even realising. That makes it a really useful tool for an author to influence the reader’s experience.

And therefore essential.