Lots of writers get to the middle of a story and flail about. They end up writing scene after scene that doesn’t seem to get anywhere. They know the ending of the story, but somehow the middle gets bogged down in details or with superfluous backstory or perhaps a new character to spice things up all of a sudden.
Many call this the muddy middle.
How can writers avoid this terrible spot?
Last week I had Janice Hardy on the Pencils&Lipstick podcast and she said something that had me thinking. I was just in the moment of needing to write the middle scene and yet found myself avoiding it, wondering if the scenes leading up to it were good enough. (Even though it’s a rough draft, so really, who cares? I’ll be going over it again and again and again anyway…)
What Janice Hardy said was that she never starts a novel until she knows the ‘Promise of the Premise’.
What is the premise?
The premise is the presupposed situation that your character must deal with in order to get to his/her goal. And many, many times it comes right around the middle of the story.
It doesn’t have to be a huge bomb exploding event, but it can be. It could also be a fight, or the moment they discover someone isn’t who they thought, or the protagonist finds a new goal (the real one) to drive them further.
More than anything, it’s the moment that has your protagonist feeling as though they are on the edge, about the cross the red line. That line of no return, as it is. The point at which they must go forward no matter what.
Which is the whole point of the story, is it not?
Sometimes getting to the middle point is hard, mostly because the writer feels stressed out about getting it right. After all, that would really be the point where the reader puts down the story and walks away if the premise turns out to be boring.
A way to get there
As I was walking down my stairs, thinking about all of this, I thought to myself, “Right, get out your computer and just hash out the scene. Whether you’ve led into it. Then we can lead in and out from there.”
And you know what? It felt nice to just get it out and done, because now I can look at it from all sides and see where more tension needs to be placed in the scenes leading up to the premise and what needs to happen for my protagonist to go forward after the premise.
So, if you’re having trouble with the middle, try writing out the scene, whether you’re there in your writing now. Just take out a clean sheet of paper and get on with it. It doesn’t have to be pretty, but getting out the details will help you see things clearer. I guarantee it.
And if you want to hear Janice Hardy talk about it, you can go to her interview here.