by Stephanie Morrill
On Monday, I talked about seven elements that I think make for a good story beginning. The middle, unfortunately is a little tougher to nail down. Which is probably one of the reasons writers struggle with it so much. But here are some thoughts on what builds a strong middle of a story:
Each scene needs to be building something.
One of the reasons the first drafts of my middles start to wander and sag is that I forget that for a tight, page-turning middle, I need to be building. By this I mean at the end of each scene we should know something that we didn’t know before. It could be something about a character or the plot or both, but we always need to be moving forward with the story.
This is one of the reasons that I find first dates, school dances, an outings with friends to be very difficult scenes to write. It’s hard to write a first date that goes well without it being a total snooze.
When you’re writing any scenes – but especially your scenes in the middle – be asking yourself why this scene is necessary and what the reader has learned by reading it.
A plan that’s underway
At the end of your beginning, your main character decided to go on a journey of some sort. After they’ve made this decision, a very natural next step is that we see plans or journey underway. So if you’ve written a book about a girl who’s decided she’s going to pursue a certain college despite her parents’ disapproval, you might have a scene that has her sneakily printing out her application or meeting with a college guidance counselor in secret.
Or if your character is on a more literal quest, like Frodo on his way to destroy the ring, you would want to show your character on his journey. Ideally in a scene that sets up who’s with him, what they’re up against, and what the strengths and weaknesses of the group are.
The introduction of the B story
Sometimes this is a full on subplot – a storyline that has its own beginning, middle, and end within the story. Other times it’s a story layer that enhances the main plot. Commonly it’s a romance or suspense thread. While you might have laid groundwork for the B story in the beginning, you’ll likely want to bring it forward again early in the middle.
In Me, Just Different, one of the plot layers is the budding relationship between Skylar’s younger sister, Abbie, and Connor’s younger brother, Chris. It gets introduced somewhere around chapter three or four.
Obstacles that are increasingly harder to overcome.
That’s nice and vague, isn’t it? Obstacles are anything you put in your characters way of achieving their goal. So going back to our example of the girl who’s trying to get into her dream college without her parents knowing it. Some obstacles you might come up with are:
She flunks a test
Her parents take away her personal computer – now she has to do everything on the family one.
She doesn’t get accepted for financial aid.
You want the obstacles to get progressively harder for her to overcome. Not qualifying for financial aid is a bigger deal than flunking one test, so you would want the test thing to happen first.
The show 24 was really great about doing that. First Jack Bauer and team might be pursuing someone who they thought was trying to blow up a mall, and that would be the focus for awhile. But then we would find out it was tied to a bigger group of terrorists, and the mall was a decoy while they worked to blow up an airport instead. The obstacles (and the stakes) grew almost every time they thought they had something solved.
We talked about character development not long ago and about letting your main characters fail an early test so they can have victory later. Keep in mind that these obstacles can foreshadow what your characters’ weaknesses might be in the time of the final battle.
A scene that exposes your character for what they are – either good and bad.
Ideally. I think it’s whichever they’ve been trying to hide more. If they have some ugliness inside that they’ve been trying desperately to hide, I would bring that out. Or if you have a main character with a tough exterior, I would write a scene that reveals their softness.
Or why not both? Maybe one before the big middle scene and the other after.
A big middle scene.
I’ll admit, this is a new-ish concept for me, so you probably won’t be able to find one in the Skylar Hoyt books. (Or if you do, it was dumb luck.)
A big middle scene can involve a false high, a deep low point, or a complex pivot in the story. The best one I’ve read recently was in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. We had a couple chapters of bad news, and then some really bad news, and I actually had the thought, “This has got to be the middle of the book.” And it was almost exactly the middle. (I know I’m being vague, but I try to be sensitive about spoilers on here. Especially for a fifth book in a series.)
In The Hunger Games Katniss’s showdown with the Careers and the genetically altered wasps is a complex pivot in the story and a great middle scene. Another great example I’ve heard is in Gone with the Wind when Scarlett O’Hara holds up the carrots or the radishes or whatever they are and vows that she’ll “never go hungry again!”
I’ll continue this list on Monday! What are some obstacles you’ve given your character in the middle of your story?
