Story is a matter of organization

A couple of days ago, I was responsible for teaching a lesson on "Genomic Approaches to Multifactorial Disease" to a class of college juniors. It was a topic that I knew very little about, considering my thesis was about arsenic contamination in Bangladesh.

As the cherry on top, none of my co-workers in lab really knew much about "Genomic Approaches to Multifactorial Disease" either--and they all happened to be very busy last week, so they probably couldn't have helped me even if they did--so I ended up giving a practice lesson to my friend T, who is a fellow writer, not a scientist.

So, there T and I are, practicing in my office, and I'm throwing out scientific terms and diagrams and methods of statistical analysis, when he raises his hand and says, "I think you should show and not tell."

It took me a second to understand where he was going with this, but then I figured it out.

See, I had been giving a general outline of genomic approaches to multifactorial diseases to him without getting to an actual example, like the study of high blood pressure, and he said that, for him, the example would make everything clearer.

The whole experience reminded me that almost every message we communicate to someone else can be organized in the form of a story...and techniques that we use to tell an exciting story can also be applied to any messages to make them more exciting.

When the time came for me to give my actual lesson, I organized each part of my lecture to come out like a story, setting up a question in the beginning, going through the thought process of how to solve that question, and then building to the climax where the question was answered. It made for an engaging discussion, and I had multiple students come up to me after the lecture to say how interesting my talk was.

This has all reminded me that the skills we learn as story tellers can be applied to so many things outside of our fiction writing. I think I seem to be a more interesting person in general because I've learned to share details about my life more in a story form. It's a matter of organization, setting things up so that there's a beginning, middle, and end. It's a nice tool to carry in our back pocket for anytime we need it.

And! It's December 6, just a few days before all of our Notes From Underground stories are due! I'm excited to see what we end up with. Already, we've gotten some great stories, and I can't wait to get them published and available for readers!

More On Middles: Starting Over

I've read any number of novels where the middle section moves the protagonist to a new setting and surrounds him with new characters. One of the difficulties of this sort of structure is that, in a lot of ways, the story sort of starts all over again. The author risks slowing things down to a crawl while she introduces setting, characters, backstories and all sorts of exposition. I cast my mind back to Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake, which does this "relocating and starting over" several times during the second act.

My work-in-progress has just moved into the second act, and I've written the first chapter of the middle. My challenges were to introduce a new setting and at least four new characters, as rapidly as possible while still keeping the action moving forward and not letting all the exposition display itself as exposition. Those are the same sorts of challenges we face at the beginning of a story, and I think it's essential that we meet those challenges the same way, with the same ideal of keeping the action going.

Rather than prolix and beazle on in the abstract, I think I'll just show you the first part of Chapter Ten, where my WIP's Second Act starts, and comment on what I'm doing as I go along. This is a pretty long excerpt, so you might want to come back and read all this when you have more time. Just saying. Also, this is still a bit rough since I wrote it only a few days ago, so all the usual caveats. Ready? Here we go:

(My explanatory notes are all in blue italics below.)

Chapter Ten

A local legend, very ancient, tells of the giantess Hvenhild who gathered up an armload of hills in Zealand, put the acres of earth into her apron and waded over the Sound toward Sweden, ten miles away. When Hvenhild was halfway across the water, one of her apron strings snapped and all her thousands of tons of soil fell into the Sound. I imagine the giantess looking sidelong at the great pile of hills she’d dropped, pushing at it with her toe for a moment and then lumbering off through the waves to sit on the Swedish shore and repair her apron, abandoning her lost acres without another thought. When Hvenhild was long dead and we Danes came to settle the island, we named it after her.

I didn't want to jump right in to a description of the new location, and I didn't want to say "So I got on a boat and went to this island." After about four false starts, I hit on the idea of introducing the island location by telling the myth of its origin. I may end up cutting this paragraph, as it's not really necessary, but I like the image of Hvenhild.

Hven rises up from the waters abruptly, a flat bluff with steep white cliffs all around and ringed with dangerous, rocky beaches. There is one small harbor on the north side of the island, where a steep road angles up through a gap in the cliffs, and visitors to the island are obliged to climb up hundreds of feet to the peasant village of Tuna. Standing, finally, on the rolling plain above the cliffs one can turn and look northward to see Kronberg, seven miles distant. The castle is a brick red and coppery green smudge on the faraway shore. Hven is likewise visible from Kronberg, the cliffs a white line floating on the Sound and the bell tower of the church of St. Ibb is a dark obelisk, a solitary tombstone. Elsinore and Hven seem far apart, different lands or even different worlds.

It was not snowing the morning I crossed from Elsinore Harbor to the landing at Hven’s north shore, but nor was it a pleasant day. A low mass of gray cloud filled the heavens and the Sound was a seething, undulating thing of gray wave upon gray wave. The coastlines of Denmark and Sweden were buried under three feet of snow, as was Hven. The world looked hewn from ice, ivory and granite.

The crossing took two hours in our small boat. Marcellus had assigned two Danish soldiers as my assistants, named Cornelius and Voltemont. They played dice, drank mulled wine and complained of the cold and wet during the voyage. They complained again when there was no one at hand to unload our supplies at Hven’s wharf, and their loud complaints as we dragged our trunks, sacks and boxes up the road from the wharf to the town were doubtless audible as far away as the moon.

So that's setting, travel to the new setting, and introduction of Cornelius and Voltemont, who will provide some comic relief. The typical style of their speech follows:

“There is no inn on this island,” Cornelius said.

“Nor a tavern neither,” Voltemont said.

“We must carry our trunks two miles, over hills buried in snow and then build our own fire at Brahe’s ruin,” Cornelius said.

“There will be no dry wood.”

“There will be no dry bed.”

“There will be nothing but a hole in the ground, and we three freezing in it.”

“You men,” I said. “Have either of you been to Uraniborg since Tycho left it?”

“Nay,” they answered. Neither man had stepped foot on the island in his life.

“Go to the church and borrow a cart and oxen,” I said. “We will light a fire in Tycho’s kitchen by noon, I tell you.”

Voltemont ran to the church while Cornelius and I stood at the edge of town, stamping our feet and rubbing our arms under our fur cloaks. Tuna was a village of a few score houses built from stone and wood with roofs of thatch. There were no people about but smoke rose from the chimney of every house and we smelled pottage and bread cooking.

That's right, more setting. This time it's the village of Tuna. Tuna is small. Also, everyone is warm and snug except our three plucky travelers.

“Voltemont takes his time,” Cornelius said. “Belike he joins the priest for a meal at the fireside. He will forget his friends, who turn to ice outside.”

Cornelius complaining. Get used to that.

“Nay, here he comes.”

St. Ibb’s is a small stone chapel that is centuries old and has a bell tower the height of six men. Voltemont hurried from the church, coming forth in a cloud of steam from a narrow side door. Before the door closed I saw the great bulk of Father Maltar. He was not smiling. I had almost forgotten Father Maltar.

Introduction of Fr. Maltar. "I had almost forgotten Fr. M" is meant to be ominous.

“That ancient priest refuses us,” Voltemont said. “His cart, oxen and driver are not at the beck of every slave from Elsinore, he says.”

What ho! Conflict! Conflict is good.

“Says he?” Cornelius put a hand upon the hilt of his sword. “Well, we ought at least claim right of sanctuary in the chapel and go inside.”

“Aye,” Voltemont said. “It is warm in the church. We have missed matins, but we may be in time for dinner.”

“Enough.” I picked up my cases and walked toward the church. With each step I sank an inch into the snow and I tried to remember Hven during the summer, when the hillsides flowed under deep green carpets of long grass where sheep and cattle grazed, when crops rippled in a gentle breeze while fish schooled in the sixty linked ponds Tycho had dug west of the observatory. I tried to recall the good smell of the earth beneath the maples where I had read Copernicus in the hours after dining. These memories refused me. I had nothing but the air filled with ice and wind, a low gray sky, the noise of the waves all around and deep snow lying over the whole of the island. My ears and nose felt brittle in the cold.

All of this is to show that Horatio (the protagonist/narrator) is familiar with the island, but he thinks of it differently than he now sees it. So Horatio is not a stranger, but he will still be uncomfortable there. Discomfort is conflict, which is good.

“Bring over your packs and trunks,” I called to my assistants. “We will speak to Father Maltar.”

It was dark inside St. Ibb’s, and humid, but it was warm. Father Maltar took up most of a low bench by the stove, a young priest and a boy who I took to be a villager sat beside him on wooden stools. Maltar did not look up even when I dropped my cases into a pew with no little noise. Cornelius and Voltemont set up their own racket a moment later as they dragged two large wooden trunks over the threshold and across the flagstone floor.

Two more new characters: the young priest and the boy!

“We are on a mission for the king,” I said, stepping over to the stove. I stood beside the young priest, stretched out my hands to the fire and tried to catch Maltar’s eye. “We require your assistance.”

“So you’ve returned,” Maltar said. His voice was low and rumbled deep in his chest. He looked at the grate of the stove, as if he spoke to it and not to me. “The great man’s toad hops across the Sound and into my church once again.”

Hey, looks like Maltar and Horatio know each other and don't get along so well. We jump immediately into their conflict. Maltar is characterized almost entirely through his animosity toward Horatio, since that's the single most important role he plays in the drama.

“Brahe is not here, only the will of the king,” I said. “We serve the king. As do you, Father.”

“Brahe is dead.” Maltar groaned out the words.

“Aye, but the king lives, and we do his bidding.”

“Brahe is dead.”

“Indeed, Father. I have been tasked with removing all traces of him from Hven. You should thank me.”

“Were I a younger man, I’d thank you with a beating.”

A very old priest threatens to beat you up. What's that say about you?

“You are thankfully spared that effort, then. We only require cartage to Uraniborg.”

“I had a dream.”

“Did you dream of an ox cart, Father?”

Fr. Maltar and Horatio will continue to snark at each other.

et cetera, end of excerpt

So that's what I've done to begin the middle of my WIP, introduce new characters into the story and set the stage in a new location. The technical bit that I think you should be aware of is this: whatever you do, do it quickly. Don't waste time. Get the most important information onto the page right away, and use it to show character. The dialogue here all serves not only to move the action forward, but to show us who the people are who are speaking. Cornelius and Voltemont are buffoons. Father Maltar is not the protagonist's friend. The young priest shows himself later to be allied with Maltar. The boy will be kind to the protagonist but there's some mystery about him. Get to the important stuff first; there is plenty of time later to round out the characters if you want to.

Also, just like at the beginning of the main story back in Chapter One, it's important to build mystery and suspense. That's why you never will get the story of Horatio's previous time on the island in one neat chunk, and every bit of information you get will lead to more questions. Questions = mystery = suspense = tension and all of that keeps the reader turning pages.

This was a long post, but I didn't know any other way to show (not tell!) my possibly useful advice about the start of Second Acts. Do forgive my going on like this.

Keep Your Middle From Sagging

I am thinking a lot about middles of novels right now, as I am just embarking on the middle of a first draft. The middle of a book is notoriously the place where the story slackens and readers find themselves slogging along, laboring to make headway through your book, almost fighting against you to make it safely across the swamp that is the Second Act of your story.

I think that there are a couple of things that make middles sag:

1. The story is too simple and the middle 100-200 pages are, frankly, padding (as Nick Hornby says, you're just keeping the reader's left and right hands apart).

2. The story is suspended for a few hundred pages while the writer digresses into discussions of his pet subjects, which have nothing to do with the story you're reading.

3. The plot becomes episodic, one similar conflict resolution after the other, and despite the author's imaginative new dangers to throw at the hero, the story feels repetitive (and dull).

4. The plot, the characters, the story are all sort of wandering around and going nowhere in particular for 40,000 words.

Now, consider that numbers 3 and 4 are actually symptoms of number 1.

In number 3, the story becomes a long series of episodes because the writer is attempting to show growth or progress or something, and it's all just mechanics: a dramatized list to prove that the hero is ready for the climax in Act Three. Or, the author is blindly following the maxim to "put your protagonist in a tree and throw rocks at him." But it's not a story, it's just the hero doing whatever the story's equivalent of pushups is. There is no real forward motion, there's just a lot of running in place or in circles. That is rarely interesting for long, and shows that (as I claim) the story is too simple to justify its length.

In number 4, the writer has no idea what to do and has to fill in space until it's time for the climax, so (because the story is too simple) the characters just mill about waiting for the bell to ring and let them back into class, as it were.

So really there are, as I see it, only two real reasons that middles sag: the writer decides to digress and leave the story behind for some length of time, or the writer has not got a strong enough story to fill the length of a novel.

Both of these problems are problems of structure, of the way the story itself is conceived by the writer. To fix Problem Number 2, my answer is Don't Do It. Seems pretty straightforward. But then you don't have a middle of your book, and you're back to suffering from Problem Number 1.

I pause to insert the idea that another possible problem with the middle of the book is that it's simply badly written and even if the story is well-structured, the telling is not well done. That's a whole other (and larger, sadly enough) topic. So back to where I was.

Problem Number 1: The story is too simple.

I see, in my wide travels as intinerant internet reader guy, a lot of early novels that have sort of one-dimensional stories. By that I mean stories where there is a problem put before the protagonist and they doggedly push on to solve it. There is, essentially, only one thing happening in the story, and the story operates at a single level: the level of the primary action of solving the problem. This means that these stories lack depth, usually, and they also lack variety and suspense.

They lack variety because there is basically one action: the protagonist moves toward a goal and encounters resistance. Even in those books where the protagonist gets the quest at the end of Act One, gathers strength during Act Two and then has a dark night of the soul before the climax in Act Three but suffers through the epiphanic moment to make the triumph possible (that is, books which follow the Campbellian Hero's Transformative Journey), you still have just the one real action, of the hero implacably moving against the antagonist. You throw in subplots all you like, you've still got a one-dimensional story going.

These stories lack suspense because the meaning of the actions are generally clear by the beginning of the Second Act. Yes, the story question ("will Luke destroy the Death Star and become part of the Rebel Alliance and clear up that skin condition?") remains unanswered, but if that's the only question the reader has, the suspense will turn to mere waiting during that long middle stretch. There is no mystery behind the story question, no deeper unknowns than the outcome of the primary conflict. That amount of suspense is not enough to carry a whole book.

What you need, then, is more variety to your story, more mystery and more layers of suspense. How do you do this? By making the story more complex. I am going to suggest a general framework for this, and it's a very old and reliable framework that's been around for centuries.

I call it the Inner and Outer Conflict Structure, and I have come to lean heavily on it because it works, it's flexible, it's generally invisible to the reader and it's applicable to all genres of fiction including literary.

It works like this:

You already have a story with a conflict (if you don't, then you don't have a story and this isn't the post for you). This conflict is either an external (Outer) conflict (Luke versus the Empire) or an internal (Inner) conflict (Gogol versus his idea of his parent's expectations of him, which is to say, of his expectations of himself). What you need to do is figure out which type of conflict you have in your story, and then come up with a conflict of the other type. That is, if your story has an outer conflict (George must kill the dragon), you need to find an inner conflict (George's father was saved by a dragon and George is, you know, morally opposed to killing dragons because he was raised with stories of the benevolence of dragons even though he has never, it must be said, personally met a dragon).

So you have your inner and outer conflicts. What you do then is build a three-part structure where the outer parts (Act One and Act Three) are the outer conflict, and the middle of the story (Act Two, natch) is the inner conflict. Like so:

Act One: George versus dragon (unresolved)

Act Two: George versus his feelings about dragons (conflict resolved during this act)

Act Three: George versus dragon (resolved)

When Act One ends, the outer conflict is still unresolved, and the reader doesn't know which way things will go. This is the unanswered story question, and is the primary suspense that will go stale if that's all you've got. So Act Two introduces the inner conflict, which is related to the outer conflict. This is variety, and the new story question adds more suspense for the reader. Also, the inner conflict is often more interesting to the reader than the outer conflict, which makes the reader perk up her ears and become more interested in your story as the middle of the book progresses. There's no reader boredom because there is a whole miniature drama in the center of your story, and this inner conflict must be resolved before the outer conflict can be. George can't commit to battle (or not battle) against the dragon until he works out how he feels about dragons in real life, once he has some exposure to the ways of real dragons. If he decides that dragons are as he thought, peaceful but misunderstood beings, Act Three isn't going to be a bloodbath. If he decides that dragons are actually dumb, violent beasts and his father made up the story about being saved by a dragon to hide a crime he'd committed, then maybe George will sharpen his lance and go slay a large reptile. Either way, the story has become much more complex, much deeper, possibly more meaningful and certainly it will be easier to write the middle when there's really a middle to be written.

If this is all obvs to most of you, then I apologize. If this is new stuff, or if you disagree with/see flaws in this version of the 3-Act structure, say so. If you have a different, but widely-applicable way of structuring your stories that defeats the devil of sagging middles, please share it!

Some Thoughts on Middles

In my current work-in-progress, I am moving steadily toward the end of Act One (I like to pretend that I'm writing this novel in the shape of a classic three-act drama), which means that soon enough I'll be writing Act Two, also known as either the Middle or the Long Dark Nighttime of the Novel (LDNTOTN). As anyone who's ever written a whole novel knows, the middle (or second act, or LDNTOTN) takes up about half the total length of the story, and can be the hardest part to get through. It's also the place where most failed novels meet their doom, though they don't know it and stumble on for another hundred or more pages, sometimes managing to drag the reluctant reader along to the end. Sometimes not.

Anyway, I'm gearing up to write the middle of my novel, so I've been thinking about what the middle of a novel is and what the function of the Second Act might be in a long-form story. Aside from, that is, padding the book out by 150 pages.

If you use the traditional three-act structure, your Act One sets up a conflict that will be resolved in the climax at Act Three. Act Two, therefore, is the bridge between the first and third acts. But what do you, as a writer, do to bridge those acts? How do you make your second act a middle--a bridge--and not just a LDNTOTN?

My current working theory about how stories operate tells me that the beginning and ending of the story are pretty much where the plot resides. You set up a conflict and you resolve it. That's pretty mechanical, pretty easy and straighforward. So if the plot is in the outer acts, what's in the middle? Character, that's what. The middle of the book is where the writer explores the possibilities of the characters' emotions. It is, as lots of prior essayists have said, the heart of the book. It is also, at least in my current working theory about stories, a sort of separate and self-contained story within the novel. And as a self-contained story, it has its own structure.

The idea I'm working with now will be to give Act Two--my novel's middle--a three-act structure of its own. My Act Two will begin, go on a bit, and then end. Things will be different at the end of the second act for my characters. They will have gone through emotional story arcs that make Act Three both possible and inevitable. So the overall structure of the novel will be:

First Act
(~30% of length)

Second Act
(beginning...middle...ending)
(~50% of length)

Third Act
(20% of length)

In fact, each act will in turn be broken down into beginning/middle/ending, but that's a separate post. Let's just stick with Act Two.

My book's middle section begins with the protagonist and two support characters running for their lives. The basic task for them, plotwise, is to simply survive the second act. They don't even know a third act is coming. But my protagonist has an internal conflict (a problem) he must resolve, and Act Two will show him going through several emotional stages:

1. he first thinks that he need do nothing and the problem will go away
2. he thinks that he can make the problem go away
3. he realizes that he can't make the problem go away without stepping outside his normal way of behaving
4. finally he acts in a new way that will solve his internal conflict (which, happily for the author, will force the external conflict to resurface and give us the exciting and ultraviolent Third Act. In fact, his achieving stage 4 in this emotional arc is the beginning of the Third Act. Yay, structure!)

Along the way, in order for my protagonist to move through these emotional stages, he and his support characters will have some adventures that outline the central themes in the book, meet new characters and see the world in new ways. Their relationship with the world in terms of the plot will not change much during the middle of the book, but their relationships with the world and with each other in terms of their emotions and character will be dramatically different. This change is, in my current opinion, the purpose of Act Two in a three-act story.

And even if I'm wrong, it's nice to have a plan going into the draft. I'll let you know how it works out.

Questions for you: What is the function of the middle of a novel? What should the writer be trying to accomplish there? Is it essentially different for each story written? Do you use any sort of overarching structural ideas to shape your storytelling? Are these questions too overly academic? What's for dinner?

Just then, the protagonist tripped...

I had a fascinating but lengthy prologue to this article which I've just cut because, you know, it was just me prolixing on about how cool I am. So let's just get to the goods instead.

Sometimes writers get stuck in the middle of their narratives. The story develops too quickly, for example, and your protagonist's journey from inciting incident to climax is over before you know it and your book is only 50,000 words long. Or, you simply don't know what to do with your characters on the way through Act Two (if you think in terms of a three-act structure). Anyway, there are three basic things you can do to make your plot more interesting during the middle of the story (and, incidentally, up your word count).*

The basic idea is to interrupt your protagonist's journey toward the climax. I will, alas, use examples from "Star Wars" because I doubt most of us share the same reading habits and references. Also, I get to be a geeky SW fan. Live with it.

Complications: These are things, people, or events that slow the protagonist's movement toward their goal. Luke being told by his uncle that he has to wait another year before applying to the Academy and leaving Tatooine is a complication.

Roadblocks: These are things, people, or events that stop the protagonist in his tracks. The Millenium Falcon being snagged by the Death Star is a roadblock.

Reversals: These are things, people, or events that turn the story on its head; the protagonist changes his worldview, his direction and often his goal. Luke's family being killed by the Imperial forces is a reversal.

All of these things are essentially problems the protagonist must solve. You can simply make them things that have happened to the protagonist, but that would be wrong. Why? Because a passive character to whom things happen but who does not himself act is boring. Rule Number One is that you do not bore your reader.

So, if your story is lagging, you give your protagonist problems to solve. Beginning writers tend to just throw these things at their characters in a long episodic middle stretch, and none of the problems are connected to the story as a whole. That's bad. All of your plot complications, roadblocks and reversals should grow out of things, persons or events that have appeared earlier in the story. Minor conflicts from Act One can loop back around and reappear as major conflicts in Act Two. This will give your story balance and shape and internal consistency.

Also, you might consider giving complications to your antagonist. How your villain (to sort of continue Michelle's post of yesterday about complex antagonists) deals with adversity might give us clues about his motivations and weaknesses, possibly foreshadowing the climax. Foreshadowing is teh roxor. Don't forget to use it. See above comments about events/items/people looping back around into the story.

So that's my advice today: if you find your story lagging or rambling in the middle, try to focus on the protagonist's goals. Point him at his goals and them have him trip, fall into a hole, come against a wall, or realize his basic assumptions are all wrong. Even if none of these ideas make it into your story, they could be useful brainstorming prompts that end up giving you ideas better than anything I could possibly offer.

*Does that all sound too formulaic and calculating and anti-art? I try to give pragmatic, nuts-and-bolts technical advice here. I don't know about art.

In Medias Res

In Medias Res is Latin for "in the middle of things," and refers to the story-telling device of starting a narrative not at the beginning but during a dramatic scene, skipping any backstory or setting or characterization and getting directly to the action. You open the book to page one and BANG! you're in the middle of the story already.

Literary agents seem to like this approach, if one judges by their blogs, and one is tempted to say that this is a "modern" writing technique, that the classics of literature could not be published today because writers used to spend the first 10,000 words of their books giving us setting and backstory and introducing characters. But beginning in medias res has a long and illustrious history. I took a quick look at my librarything account and grabbed the following titles, all of which start in the middle of the action:

True History of the Kelly Gang (published 2002)
My Name is Red (published 2001)
The Master and Margarita (published 1966)
Crime and Punishment (published 1866)
Paradise Lost (published 1667)
Hamlet (published 1601)
The Iliad (written c. 800 BCE)
The Odyssey (written c. 800 BCE)

I'm not going to discuss the relative merits of beginning in medias res versus easing into/setting up the story (though feel free to do so in the comments). What I will do is, maybe, give some advice on how to structure the beginning of a novel to start off in medias res. It's going to be oversimplified, cookbook-style advice, because we must deal with generalities in a forum like this. Sorry.

I will assume you have written something like this:

Prologue (ick!)
Hook sentence or paragraph.
Backstory and setting.
Dramatic action leading to inciting incident.
Inciting incident.
et cetera.

Step One: Read your first chapter or two and find the first dramatic action that is part of the story's real conflict. By which I mean, if your book is about a vampire hunter who is haunted (sorry) by his past, skip the story about his past, no matter how dramatic, and get to the story-present's first dramatic scene (likely some vampire hunting by the adult protagonist).

Step Two: Start your book at the scene you found in Step One. It begins there and goes on from there, just as you've written it. What about all that stuff that used to go before it? Well, you're going to cut most of it. Read on.

Step Three: Cut your prologue. You don't need it. I know: you love your prologue, and know in your heart that the story can't begin without it. Your heart, alas, she is wrong. Admit that your prologue is back-story, and You Do Not Begin With Back-story!

Step Four: Read your book, beginning with the new first scene. Do you really need any of the back-story you cut out? Really? Do you? How much of it? Note where there is missing information that must be filled in.

Step Five: Read through all the stuff that you have skipped over by beginning with the new first scene. Highlight or otherwise mark those things that are absolutely necessary for the reader to understand the story; you aim to fill in those areas you flagged in Step Four. Cut everything else. No, I mean it: cut everything else. You don't need it, and your readers don't want it.

Step Six: There is no Step Six. You're done. Move on with your life and enjoy your shiny new actiony story beginning. You should have a structure that now looks like this:

Dramatic action leading to inciting incident.
More dramatic action leading to inciting incident.
Inciting incident.
Possible introduction of back-story.
et cetera.

A note on Step Five: You might want to keep some of the details you don't necessarily need for clarity, and use them to add depth and substance to the book. Just don't let your world-building and gorgeous descriptive passages get in the way of the story itself.

Also: there are other ways to do this, other ways to structure a story, and they are equally valid. I'm just offering up a simple way to turn a slow-starting novel into something that starts more quickly. And again, I'm not saying that this is the Best Way to start a story; it's just one way to do it.

Sagging Middles

I'm sure we've all read any number of books (maybe even most of the books we read) where the middle drags, and we have to give ourselves an extra push to get past that slow bit and find where the story picks up the pace again. As I say, I think the great majority of novels built on the standard 3-act structure tend to sag a bit in the midsection, much like certain middle-aged writers we won't be discussing here.

I have a theory that this isn't necessarily a fault of the writer, but is a function of the 3-act structure itself. I begin to believe that the normal form of the novel is a flawed structure, or at least an imperfect one.

Here's what I think happens: You begin the book with rising action and exposition to set up a dramatic situation, an inciting incident that happens somewhere during the first third of your story. You've done a job of work giving your reader compelling characters with needs and then you build up to a dramatic moment that changes the world of the story, creates a conflict that must be resolved, and then Act One is over, and your reader is hooked.

Well, that's all fine, isn't it? Except what happens then? Essentially, in many cases, the story sort of starts over again. You have Act Two to set up the even more dramatic moment of the climax, which means that your level of action has seemingly fallen off because there's been a new status quo established in the novel's world from which you must again build some sort of rising action. This entails even more exposition, and often we take side trips to explore our theme and subplots, so the new focus on movement toward the climax gets diffused now. It's like moving from a finished house back into an unfinished house that we watch being built around us.

In other words, the traditional 3-act structure has this slow middle section built into it, because after the first big BANG plot-point of the inciting incident, we must basically begin again, nearly from zero.

I don't happen to have a list of useful ways to avoid this. What I'm going to attempt to do in my current book is have the inciting incident open up an interesting and compelling idea to be explored, so that the reader will have something that holds their interest while I subtly build up the dramatic tension in the background again. Will that work? I have no idea, but that's my plan.

Has anyone ever found that their novel dragged in the middle, and fixed it? How did you fix it? Is is a widely-applicable method? Will you use it in the future? Can anyone think of any novels that don't drag in the middle? What do you think the writer did to keep things moving for the reader?