What is subtext and how can it improve your writing?

In a recent Itch of Writing Q&A, a supporter asked about including more subtext in their novel, as some writing-group colleagues had suggested it would improve their writing: specifically the depth and atmosphere. But what did those writers mean, and how might you go about building your subtext?

Quite literally, ‘subtext’ simply means something which is ‘under’ or ‘below’, the text, as in the words on the page. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theories puts it like this:

what is suggested or hinted, what is ambiguous, marginal, ambivalent, evasive, emphasized or not emphasized.

So overall the label ‘subtext’ covers a lot of possibilities, but I don’t think those writing-group mates were applying Ricoeur’s hermeneutic of suspicion. And although a novel can absolutely have, for example, a political subtext (which is where the concept of subtext overlaps with that of themes and ideas) I suspect the writing group were talking about subtext in the form we’ve borrowed from theatre.

Photographer Minor White said, ‘One should not only photograph things for what they are but for what else they are,’ and ‘what else they are’, you could say, is the subtext. As I said in that post, it’s the ‘else’ that raises writing from ‘enjoyable and serviceable’ to something really special: it’s when every phrase and scene is doing at least two jobs in the text. Subtext is very likely to be one of those jobs.