the craft. writing the middle.
I know you may not suspect it, but I partake in watching the chaos that is Netflix’s Love is Blind. I don’t need your judgment, only your support. But hey, I’m a sucker for love stories no matter how contrived, and it’s passive watching meaning, I’m typically doing something else while I have it going in the background. However, there are a lot of elements of storytelling that this mind-numbing reality show takes into consideration.
We know the desire of the characters. They are there to find love (or to get 15 minutes of fame, but we’ll go with the former), and that sends us along a drama-filled journey of ten or so episodes that we can’t stop watching. In every great story, the characters need to have a desire.
Pretty early on, we know who the protagonists and the villains are. Coughs in Matthew, Clay and AD’s eyelashes. Then, our inciting incident is each couple's proposals that send us into the real storyline of will these two people be able to stand one another outside of the pod walls?
Everything is storytelling, and whether we want to admit it or not, shows like this suck us in because they’re plotted to do so.
But here’s the thing, I mostly want to see the beginning, the introduction to the players and the end, who will be left dumbfounded at the altar? I’m not so interested in the middle, although every now and again you get a killer one liner like Jessica’s “You’re gonna need an epipen to clear your airways because you’re going to be in disbelief of what you missed out on.”
You don’t, however, want that to be your novel where people want to skip through the middle. A novel is a huge undertaking and before I did it, I’d never written anything of that magnitude before in my life. Attempting to write 70-100,000 words, depending on your genre, can easily have you losing your way in the swampy middle of your story. I believe great plotting is what will help us keep the story going strong.
In Elizabeth Nunez’s essay “Plotting the Plot,” from How We Do It: Black Writers on Craft, Practice, and Skill, she differentiates between story and plot. She describes the story as the event. “My best friend murdered her husband.” But plot as “the arrangement of events in a story that lead to a desired effect.”
Here is a quick and dirty look at story structure:
Story -> Desire -> Conflict -> Tension -> Resolve ->Crisis that begs for resolution
Conflict, tension, and resolution is where the middle comes alive. That cycle repeats throughout the middle to create a constant push and pull which keeps us intrigued while we are going through the motions of the main character’s desire. For instance, when they put the new couples in a room full of the people they passed on, but I digress.
If we want to talk more about literature, In GOOD MORNING, LOVE, Carli’s desire is to leave her full-time job and write songs for a living. In the journey to that, we meet Tau, we deal with moving up the ladder at work, etc. The obstacles essentially that will keep her from obtaining her main objective.
The middle of the story is the constant push and pull of Carli and Tau’s secret romance. The conflict is that she isn’t supposed to be dating a client at her firm. The tension is that Tau wants her to be present with him in a very public way and she has to try to cover herself at every turn including their big campaign shoot. The resolve, her boss does see a photo of them, but pegs it to salacious tabloids.
This isn’t the last time that this tension arises and throughout, we have the tension of, will her boss find out? But also will Tau break her heart? Having this cycle throughout the middle, will hopefully keep readers bought into having to see the final resolve.
Getting back to Love is Blind, one thing they have going for them is the cliffhangers at the end of each episode. That is what makes it a very bingeable show. You find yourself asking, what happens next? Which we’ve talked about a little in this newsletter before. Another way we keep the middle intriguing is ensuring each event happening in the story leads to the next.
Have you ever read a novel and there’s just a bunch of stuff happening but nothing feels cohesive? It’s because it lacks a sense of cause and effect. Because this happened, then this happened. At the least, trying to follow this throughline within your story can be helpful to plan out in your writing process.
Stories need clarity about where they’re going to carry the middle. This may leave you asking, is this a roundabout way of saying we need to outline? Maybe a little. You may already know that I’m an advocate for some type of outline. But there is NO RIGHT WAY. Please always remember that in reading my Monday musings on craft. However, at the minimum, whether you do it before or after your drafting, I would take some time to evaluate whether you have the cause and effect motion between each of your chapters.
I know many of us get afraid that an outline will stifle our creativity but Nunez puts it well in the case of outlining, “So, if you choose to create an outline, you should allow yourself the possibility that your outline will change as your writing leads you in directions you had not previously considered.” Our stories should not be victims to our planning. There should be as much flexibility as possible, but our middles thank us when they have a direction.
You can do it! I wish for all of us that we will write middles that keep our readers up in the middle of the night with red eyes and longing hearts, whispering to themselves, “just one more chapter.”
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