If the opening of a novel introduces a character with a problem to solve, the middle of any novel lets us watch as he takes all possible steps to solve it, his efforts blocked by the wily antagonist, or even downright sabotaged by said wily antagonist.
Desire and Conflict
The secret to a strong novel lies in the equally compulsive desires of the antagonist and the protagonist, coupled with their opposing value system. In other words, conflict.
If, like me, you’ve had quite a bit of conflict in your life, it can be hard to watch your characters go through a bad time. You may even find yourself giving your characters the same excuses for avoiding it. But a novel without conflict is like a whale without an ocean.
Increase the Conflict
Instead of letting this problem beat you, make it work for you. Examine the conflicts you fear the most, then use them in your novel. Put your protagonist in a situation with stakes so high that he has no choice but to act. Make the antagonist do something that so enrages your protagonist that there’s no going back. No safe path is available. The action your protagonist then takes will similarly enrage your villain, if the stakes are high enough.
Rising Action
The basic structure to any story is that you set a goal for your protagonist and then put things in the way of the character achieving his or her goal. These obstacles are minor complications and they make up the second act or middle of your story. Each minor complication on the way to the climax of the story should be bigger and fraught with more danger/consequences than the last. Often, complications result in reversals–where the tables are turned on the protagonist making it more difficult for the character to reach his or her goal.
This is rising action. If the incidents do not build on top of each other and keep raising the stakes, then the reader will lose interest. This is what provides the story with forward impetus, building a sense of momentum to the inevitable climax if the story.
Each complication has a minor climax. Just as a story builds to its main climax from which the lead characters or the audience has learned something, the same is true of the minor climaxes. Following each minor climax, there should be a brief period of falling action. This allows the audience a chance to catch their breath and absorb what they’ve just witnessed. I look at it this way: the resolution of each minor climax comes with some kind of cost or reversal, and the falling action examines that cost.
If you keep building complication upon complication without any resolution, you will leave the audience exhausted, and the subsequent complications and climaxes will have a lesser impact because you have not let them lower their defenses again. It’s important to release that tension at some point or you’ll exhaust your reader and over-saturate their senses.
The climax of the story is the biggest complication or the crisis. Everything in your story should lead inevitably to this moment. To me, this is the decision or action that protagonist must make from which there is no turning back–nothing will ever be the same again. The second act ends with the climax.
Raise the Stakes
Introduce a sub-plot (like a new romantic interest in peril, or a kidnapped sibling) that makes the conflict personal.
Take the central story problem, which at first only affected the protagonist, and make it affect the whole town, or country, or world, or life itself. By doing this in progressive stages we see things get worse, the plot thickens, the complications rise.
Mid-Story Revelation
There’s absolutely no need for the middle of your novel to sag if you employ the power of a backstory revelation (with clues carefully planted from the start). This can be a game-changer that opens up a whole new layer of understanding for both your hero and your readers. One of the best twists of this kind is in the movie Chinatown, in which we find out 1) the Faye Dunaway character is not who she first appeared to be and 2) that she had an incestuous relationship with her father that resulted in the birth of her daughter/sister and a powerful motive.
The point is that there is no need to keep all the revelations for the end. Just dumping expositional backstory is a waste of one of the novelist’s most potent tools. By hinting at a major revelation you can increase tension and mystery leading up to the big twist and then, when you reveal it with the panache of a magician revealing his favorite trick your readers will gasp with delight. Why? Because now they want to watch the ripples spread and grow until they become a tsunami in the lives of your characters. How will they react? What will they do? Will they ever be the same? Of course not. Not if you’ve done your job right.
Which brings me to my last thought for the day…
Do You Know How Your Story Ends?
We all have different ways to get there. Some of us hate the idea of planning and prefer their characters to lead them where they will, and some of us plot down to the last clue, red herring and revelation. But whichever way you work, if you have your eye on the target you’ll vastly increase your chances of hitting the bull’s eye.
So how do you shore up mushy middles? Got any tips for the rest of us?
Leave a comment and join us at #ScribeChat on Thursday, July 22nd (6 pm PT / 9 pm ET) to swop solutions!
Further Reading:
- Do You Know How Your Story Ends?
- The Best Twist Endings (in movies) Remember, you don’t have to keep twists for the end.
- Writer Unboxed: Fighting The Sag in 10 Steps
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