Over the past few Fridays, we’ve been talking about the pitfalls of story middles. Often it’s here, in the dead center of things, that we begin to notice the cracks climbing through the words of our tale. It’s easy to panic and abandon our story for something new and shiny, but chinks in a draft can be set right and you can learn to do it. In fact, fixing a broken story is one of the absolute best ways to grow as an author.

Last week we discussed some fixes for character problems. Next week we’ll address cracks in our setting. And this week let’s talk about how we can address problems with our plot.

The most important thing to keep in mind when you consider the plot of your story is that every scene must move your story forward.

If you’ve been around writing for any length of time, you’ve heard the previous statement before, but I want you to really think about what it means. We have this idea that the phrase moving the story forward is talking specifically about time. And sometimes, oftentimes, the passing of time is crucial to your story. But that’s a very limiting way to understand and apply this advice.

What’s important is that you, the author, are revealing new, relevant pieces of your story in each and every scene. That is what moves the story forward in the reader’s mind. Whether we’ve moved forward in time or backward, whether we’ve jumped into someone else’s thoughts, readers should have a wider understanding of the story as each scene plays out.

As we work toward this goal, let’s consider some of the cracks that might derail us as we reach our draft’s middle:

Your story has a weak spine.

Just as your body is dependent upon your spine for uprightness and general function, so your story depends upon a throughline to hold everything in place. If you’re not sure what your throughline is, your story will wander, and you’ll find yourself attempting to prop up characters and scenes with inconsequential moments. Moments that do not move the story forward in any meaningful way.

To discover your story’s throughline, ask yourself two questions:

1. What problem has to be solved by story’s end?
   
2. What does my main character desire in relation to this problem and its solution?

The answers to these two questions will help you determine the shape and strength of your story’s spine. If you find yourself unable to answer these questions, you likely have a weak foundation, and as with all things that require structure, the cracks in your story will continue to multiply. 

Once you’ve shored up the spine of your tale, you can then determine how to update (trim, cut, refocus) the scenes in your story that are reaching outside the framework you’ve established, scenes that weaken the whole.

Your story is boring.

Are you bored by your own story? You’re not alone. This is a common drafting issue.

Before making any adjustments you need to be able to answer this question: Are you bored because you’ve been stuck in the same scene for ages or is your story simply boring?

If you’re bored of working on the same thing for ages, give yourself permission to jump ahead a bit or take a break, but my guess is that once you’ve had a taste of something new, you’ll be ready to dig in once again.

If your story has turned out to be a snooze-fest, you might have some work to do. But with a little elbow grease and a plan, there’s no reason it can’t be salvaged. Some ideas:

1. Tighten things up. Instead of scenes laden with heavy description, intersperse short, quick, sentences into your prose. Power punches, if you will. Cut those gorgeous, thesaurus-worthy modifiers and just say it already.
   
2. Replace chunks of TELLING with action. Instead of telling the reader something important, show the reader what you mean by making the information you’re trying to share the center of a scene. If you need the reader to know just how evil the bad guy is, show us the bad guy  doing evil things.
3. Add conflict. Everything, even a family dinner, is more interesting with a side of conflict. We talked about characters last week, but there’s no separating them from your plot. If all your characters like one another, if they all get along, your story is going to sputter. But not all conflict is external. Some of it is internal and you may need to give your characters some emotional baggage to haul from one end of your story to the other. This adds the kind of struggle that makes us care about a character. You want readers to care.
4. Up the stakes. If the problem you’re trying to solve by story’s end is trivial to begin with, that might be okay. So long as the stakes rise as the story moves forward. If, by the middle of your tale, you could care less if the problem ever gets solved, you haven’t put enough on the line. Consider what you could do, right now, to make solving that problem considerably more important. What happens if your main character succeeds? What happens if he or she fails? If the end result doesn’t matter, there’s no point venturing on.

Your plot needs a different kind of hero.

This is an unsettling revelation when you’re halfway through a story you had high hopes for. But, stories are made in the edits, friend. And even if the main character you’ve been following needs a little emotional surgery, be grateful you’ve realized it now.

Sometimes a main character begins to work against the grain of the plot. Maybe you’ve created her to be an incredibly self-sufficient, do it all, fearless type-A who doesn’t need help with anything. But when you reach the story’s middle you realize her self-sufficiency is holding you back–keeping you from really exploring other characters and the internal struggles that come from having to fight through fear.

Or maybe you’ve created a main character who continually does the sensible thing. Or the dishonest thing. Or the shady thing. A hero who is completely one thing or another, is not helpful to the writing process and I’m speaking from experience here.

But what’s truly interesting is what happens to your plot when you add a single attribute to your main character. In my case, I added curiosity to a headstrong, self-sufficient character, and it changed everything. My problem scenes starting taking on a new flavor and began inching the plot back toward its original throughline. As my hero’s curiosity began to show, I found it much easier to reveal the world around her to the reader, and the other characters responded to her inquiries in fun and compelling ways.

One simple adjustment to a character and it changed my plot for the better. There’s no way around it, each of these story elements are intertwined and adjusting one will shift the others. Hopefully, the changes you make now, at your story’s middle, will move everything in the right direction. Toward those two little words we all itch to write: THE END.

Tell me, have you run into problems with your plot? Have you puzzled out the answer? I’d love to know how, and if you haven’t found a fix just yet, I’d love to help. Drop us a comment.