The Messy Middle

On mirror moments and getting through the toughest part of the manuscript

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I've started brainstorming a new novel, and I am deep in the euphoria of the bright, shiny new project. Aren’t beginnings wonderful? Since I’m a plotter, most of my efforts for the first few weeks (or months) involve taking the kernel of my sparkling seed of an idea and nurturing it into a plot, which I’ve written about in a previous column. I usually have a good handle on the beginning, and I make sure that I know the end of the story before I start. So that just leaves the famously messy middle to work out.

Why are middles so difficult? Many authors get stuck somewhere between Act One and Act Three of the commonly used three act structure. Middles can sag, they can bore, they can drain the love of the story right out of you and your reader. We’ve all experienced too many novels or movies where the momentum fades, the pacing slows, and we’re just waiting until the big finish finally occurs. That is, if we don’t check out completely. So how can we make the middle soar instead of sink?

One way is to consider the Midpoint—that central story beat—before you begin. I'm a big fan of James Scott Bell's book Write Your Novel From the Middle, where he advocates this approach.

In the center of Act Two, the Midpoint is a turning point where a character is often said to be moving from a state of reaction to action, charging ahead towards the grand finale. Bell uses the term “Mirror Moment” to describe a specific moment within this important plot beat.

Often in books and movies, a character is literally looking into a mirror at themselves or figuratively reviewing their situation and themselves: how did they get where they are? What is standing in the way of achieving their goal? How did they become this person, and do they like who they’ve become?

When I’m able to nail down this moment in the center of the character arc or the external plot arc, that can be an enormous help in clarifying what comes before and after and making sure those elements are strong and purposeful. Figuring out how to get my main characters to a point where they're engaging in this sort of self-assessment—or in a more action driven story, where they're assessing the forces arrayed against them—can often make the needle drop on other story aspects that are giving me trouble.

However, sometimes that's still not enough meat to chew on during this story main course. In the plotting systems I use, there are anywhere from seven to twenty-two story beats. But in order to truly flesh out this bare bones, high-level view of a novel and start writing the scenes, I need a lot more than that. Too often, I don’t have any idea of the specific steps it will take for a character to go from being a simple farm girl who raises goats to where she ends up, as the queen of a nation, a little more bitter and hardened, but wiser.

Enter the HCMs or Heart-clutching Moments. I heard about this method of story planning many years ago. The idea is that you can build a narrative around a number of intense scenes that will keep readers invested and on the edge of their seats. Figure out what excites you most about telling this story. What scenes have you been itching to write?

A screenwriter might call these set-pieces—the big scenes often used in movie trailers to get fans into the theater. These can include explosions, big battles, and chases, or in a quieter story, moments of revelation. When the dark sorceress reveals she’s the protagonist’s mother, or the antagonist turns out to have been helping the hero all along. Making a list of these HCMs and then moving your story from one to another can be a good way to chart out the middle and ensure it’s engrossing.

I like to make sure these external moments are paired with internal changes the character goes through. And these should be linked together in a cause-and-effect chain. Ensuring an alluring middle requires getting from Prologue to Epilogue via a series of steps that makes sense to the reader. And for me, that requires breaking down the character goals.

Characters should generally want things—knowing what they want is a crucial first plotting step. Then, I need to discover what are the consequences of failure? What are the stakes at play? If I’m really worried about how the middle is progressing, I will chart the elements of achieving the goal on a spreadsheet.

Once the goals and consequences of failure are clarified, then I need to know what the protagonist needs in order to meet her goal? Let's say our intrepid heroine's goal is to stop a war. How does she do that? Is she trying to broker a peace? Does she need to assassinate the evil queen? Is she secretly planning a coup to oust the warmongering leader?

Then I get to smaller details which really help me craft scenes and dig deeper into the world. We already know the stakes. War is not just bad for everyone, it’s bad for our heroine in particular. Her brother will be conscripted to fight, she’ll lose the family farm, her forbidden magic will be discovered—the stakes are personal. But these big consequences have smaller forewarnings, the evidence of the harm that is coming if she fails. Maybe our evil queen is slowly kidnapping local boys to fight in the army. A neighbor’s son goes missing and they’re all sure what’s happened.

Now, what are the conflicts the protagonist will face while striving for her goal? These are things standing in the way of the requirements we listed earlier. If our heroine is an envoy trying to broker a peace treaty, what stops the two sides from getting to the negotiating table? These could, and should, be both external and internal obstacles. Maybe she has a lack of faith in her ability; part of her character arc will be finding inner strength and confidence. Maybe the convoy of ambassadors is ambushed and she’ll need to send out a search party to find them. Throwing up inner and outer conflicts is all a part of well-rounded storytelling.

Every goal has costs that the hero will face when trying to achieve it. What if our heroine loses the respect of her warmongering colleagues by working to broker a treaty? Things will get more difficult for her if they question her judgement or become suspicious of her. An antagonist can sow seeds of doubt about her motives or turn her friends against her.

There will also be dividends she reaps as she barrels forward. These are small personal rewards like meeting a love interest and falling in love, or gaining special knowledge, skills, or resources that she would never have gotten otherwise.

Finally, there are smaller barriers which impede the goal. These aren’t huge conflicts, but in order to get ambassadors to the negotiating table, our heroine will have to journey far from home. Perhaps she doesn’t have the resources, her paltry salary isn’t enough, and her mission isn’t sanctioned by the powers that be. Small plot hindrances are great fodder for scenes that will work together to build toward a Heart-clutching Moment.

By now, I usually have a bunch of ideas for things that could happen in the middle, and it doesn’t seem so messy. I like to list out plot actions in a cause-and-effect chain, which I then use to build out the synopsis. Linking scenes together with statements like “yes, but” or “no, and” or even words like but or therefore help maintain continuity.

For instance, our heroine recognizes the need to bring the opposing forces to the table in a peace treaty, but the other envoys are opposed and refuse to send a messenger. Therefore, she must find another way to get a message to them and so seeks out the palace sorcerer. Plot actions toward the goal are often one step forward, two steps back, with our protagonist facing an increasing series of obstacles that lead to the big showdown.

Non-plotters will often feel their way through these steps intuitively, or work through them after writing a first draft, when they feel a bit of sag setting in. But writers rejoice! We can have clean and orderly middles, they do not have to droop like a dog’s floppy ears! As I work my way through this process on my new manuscript, I’ll keep telling myself that. And I’ll keep looking forward to finally getting to that heart-clutching ending.

Have any tips for getting through the messy middle? Let me know in the comments!