Seven Cool Tricks for Beating Your Novel’s Maddening Middle

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By

Holly Lisle

If you’re like most writers (including some of us who do this for a living) the first pages of your novel flew. The characters leapt to life, they did interesting, wonderful things, and you fell in love — with them, with the world, and with the adventure of following them as they came to life.

Driven by passion, excitement, and your gripping story idea, you got maybe a quarter of the way into your book… maaaaybe thirty percent…

And all of a sudden, things got squidgy. Iffish. Awkward.

Your characters started:

• Sitting around drinking coffee (or whiskey shots)
• Talking about the weather
• Arguing because you knew the story needed conflict (but BIG TIP — the Dreaded Conflict Argument isn’t it)

And the words stopped coming.

First, YOU ARE NOT ALONE. Most writers most of the time run out of Pure Adrenaline about a quarter to a third of the way into the book.

That’s the point where, for a lot of us, we realize that we have written a lot of words… and we still have another sixty to seventy-percent of this THING to get through before we’re done with the first draft.

NOTE: At the point where the writing stops being just pure fun and starts hinting that work is going to be required, the thing you’re working on also frequently stops being your beloved novel, it tends to get shoved aside (with some variation on the phrase “I’ll work on it later, when I figure out what happens next”) and metamorphoses into a ghost in your dreams, haunting you, demanding completion.

HERE ARE TWO THINGS YOU DON’T DO…

First, DO NOT shove the printout of the manuscript under the bed, promising you’ll get back to it when inspiration strikes.

WHY? Because if you’re not actively working on this project, workable, usable inspiration won’t strike. You figure out what happens next by working on the story, by thinking through what you already have, and by figuring out how you can use what you have to make more story.

Second, DO NOT go back through what you already have and start “fixing” words and sentences, moving paragraphs around, and replacing good SHORT words and phrases with painful long ones — like changing “chatty” to “loquacious” or “angry” to “utterly and unforgivingly furious”. Using longer words, and using ten words when one would do, this is called PADDING.

A lot of early-career writers tried padding. (Ask me how I know…)

The thinking here goes, “Surely using longer words will make me look like a smarter, better writer to editors looking to buy my work. It worked on term papers, after all.”

Painful truth? Your final term paper was the last time padding ever worked. Six-syllable words and precious phrasing just make reading what you’ve written a painful chore, and commercial editors who get hit with the Long Words Stunt in the first paragraph are not likely to read the second.

Editors can smell padding the way flies can smell horse sh- manure.

See? Horse shit would have been perfect. Meanwhile, horse manure is pretentious.

Here’s STEP ONE:

Your raw words — the ones before you do any revision at all — are going to be your most honest words. They’re the words that came from you when you were right IN the story with your characters, where you were watching your plot unfold, where your creativity was flowing, and your imagination was going full steam. Your first words hold the real voices of your characters… and they hold your real voice.

Your real voice is what you use when talking to friends, hanging out in coffee shops, or paddling a kayak down a wild river (including both the WHEEEE!!! and the Oh, SHIT! moments).

Your real voice — you being yourself — is comfortable and warm and engaging.

You being someone who’s trying to prove how many words you know and how smart you are — however… That version of you is the one who gets Editor-read-the-first-sentence-and-fled rejections.

Again… this is the voice of experience. An early rejection I still remember, word for word, is “You write very well, but nothing happens.”

The instant you stop writing the story to start piddling with fancier words and “fixing” what you already have, you’ve lost. You’re now busy killing the best part of your story’s feel

— its integrity and its freshness.

INSTEAD, commit this one sentence to memory:

You have a secret, and I will find it and USE it.

At the point where you stall, you pick one of your characters, and you say this to that character.

“You have a secret, Bob Bland… And I will find it. And USE it.”

And your character Bob shudders, and a little ice runs down his spine.

STEP TWO: Do a tiny biography of one character.

Bob Bland is a used car salesman, has a sweet wife and three small kids at home, and is considering finding a second job just to get the family a little ahead on bills, and he has a hobby — he fly-fishes.

Right there, he’s a small-town lower-middle-class Everyman, and you want to read a novel (or even a short story) about him just about as much as you want to pick cat hair out of the carpet with a pair of tweezers.

STEP THREE: Brainstorm the elements of the secret.

Bob Bland has a secret… and it’s a doozy. You don’t know what it is yet (and neither do I) but let’s find out.

You can give your character a Positive Secret. You can give your character a Negative Secret.

You can give your character one of each… and if you go with a superpower, you need a negative secret to balance the positive one — otherwise you end up writing Mary Sue fiction. (https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Sue)

But let’s not go with a superpower. Those change the nature of the fiction you’re writing.

Let’s go with a Mundane Mortal secret, and let’s brainstorm possibilities:

CATEGORY ONE

• Family-related
• Work-related
• PIHO (play-interest-hobby-obsession) -related

CATEGORY TWO

• Tied to the past
• Tied to the present
• Tied to the future

CATEGORY THREE

• Positive
• Negative
• Neutral

Pick one from each category.

Random poke of the finger on each of the three categories gives me:

• PIHO-related
• Tied to the past
• Positive

STEP FOUR: EXPAND AND DETAIL THE SECRET

PIHO-RELATED: I’ll use a HOBBY.

Bob Bland has always liked to go fly fishing, likes to tie flies (to make his own fishing lures using bare fishhooks and feathers and string and a little bit of clear nail polish to hold everything together), and he likes to walk the stream behind and uphill from the house where he lives with his family. Aside from the six-bucks-per-year local fishing license, this is a practically free hobby that also lets him put fresh food on the table.

TIED TO THE PAST: So while he’s working his way down the stream and toward home to an undercut he likes — one that occasionally yields up a bass (a kind of fish) or two — he spots something shiny in the stream.

He has his hip waders on, so he wades into the water, and reaches down, and finds…

BRAINSTORM HERE: What does he find

• A gold doubloon
• An ancient artifact that shimmers when touched
• A hand wearing a big diamond ring (but JUST the hand)

And on that third one, my brain goes WHEEEEEE!!! Cold, bloated, severed hand in the river wearing a BIG diamond (that nevertheless was not kept by the person severing the hand).

STEP FIVE: ASK QUESTIONS ABOUT YOUR DISCOVERY

So the first and most obvious question is this: Why would someone cut off a hand that has a huge, glittering, magnificent diamond set in a gorgeous gold ring (this thing just keeps getting more awesome in my mind as I imagine it)… and then THROW THE HAND AND RING AWAY?

And my brain horrifies me with the answer.

The owner of the hand cut his or her own hand off…

To get rid of the ring.

And there’s the thing that starts to fuel the middle of the story.

What in the world is wrong with that ring?

If you don’t get something great from the first question you ask, ask more questions.

These are all going to be Who-What-When-Where-Why-How questions. If your question doesn’t start with one of those words, re-write it until it does. And then work down your list answering questions. You may need to write multiple answers for each question until you clear the obvious stuff out of the way.

The obvious answer in my WHO question above was “Some criminal cut off the hand.” That answer is too easy. You have a bad guy after a fancy ring. It’s what bad guys do, so there’s simply not much story there.

Something that would make a person cut off his or her own hand, though? THAT’S something worth writing about.

At the point where your brain says, “Oh, there it is!

That’s the thing that makes me need to find out what happens next,” you move on to Step Six.

STEP SIX: BRAINSTORM YOUR BEST QUESTION

And we’re back to Who. What. When. Where. Why. How.

• Who made the ring?
• What does it do for the wearer?
• What does it do TO the wearer?
• What does it do to anyone near the wearer?
• Why was it made?
• And so on…

I’m not going to build out the answers to those questions, because I’m in the middle of writing Book Three in a five-book series right now, and I do not need another project… and this thing is starting to try to finagle its way into a world that does not need it. So, we’ll move on…

Write your questions down, and start answering them, listening for your Right-Brain (Muse) to throw weird and interesting answers at you. And when you have some good answers, go to STEP SEVEN.

STEP SEVEN: (The single most effective and evil* piece of advertising in the world.)

Wash.
Rinse.
Repeat.

Every time you get stuck on your story, just go back through these steps until you’ve written yourself to the end.*Why is “Wash. Rinse. Repeat.” not product instructions, but actually advertising? Because it causes you to go through shampoo twice as fast. If the stuff is any good at all, it works on the first wash. It’s not evil advice in writing simply because you need more than one thing to happen in your story.



So now… go kick ass on your middle. You can do this.

How To Write Great Descriptions

By Katharina Gerlach

How To Write Great Descriptions

I’m a bilingual author from Germany and I learned many things the hard way. One of my biggest obstacles was (and still is to some extent) my tendency to write lean. I do not much care for lush descriptions. Why use 20 words if 5 will suffice? The reason is quite simple:

Reading is the only known way of thought transfer. Sure, it’s a buggy process but it works if (yes, if) the author knows the difference between show and tell, and description plays a major role there.

As a child, I loved the books of an author who lived in the middle of the 19^th century. His stories were adventurous and had deep meaning. However, I skipped whole pages due to big blocks of descriptions. I wanted the action to keep moving. So when I began writing in earnest, I left out descriptions wherever possible.  Either extreme is wrong. 

In a blogpost on this site in October, Rayne Hall has already given you some pointers at how you can make your descriptions more engaging. Use your scene character’s POV to your advantage.  You can reveal or hide facts you’ll need in later chapters by mixing them into well thought out descriptions. You can also use description to characterize your POV character or characters the POV character interacts with. 

Example: “How I hated the smell of his car. The scent of cold cigarettes, french fries, and stale beer made me gag, but I had no choice. If I wanted life to continue, I had to sit in his grimy VW bug where a mass of mingled rubbish had overtaken the backseat. There were scientific papers, sheet music, food, empty beer bottles, some records and even a guitar with ripped strings and a coating that must surely be a century’s worth of grime.”

Right here, the description is only there to set the scene, the reader thinks. But later on, when the young detective discovers that all murder victims have been strangled with a guitar string, this scene gets a whole new layer of importance.

The key to great description is the use of specific details. Rayne Hall has already shown how different the perceptions of your characters should be, depending on their jobs, their hobbies, and life experiences. But even with that foundation, the choice of detail is crucial. 

Why does the architect notice this house rather than the one next to it? Does he really notice the whole house or is it the contrast of the blooming geranium in the cracked pot against the once yellow sandstone that symbolizes the district's downfall to him?

It is also important to keep in mind, what the POV character is doing in the scene you’re trying to describe. Naturally, a thief fleeing from the police will not notice how lovingly cared for the garden looks that he’s passing through. He’ll only be on the lookout for the gate or a place where he can jump the fence or a hiding place. While an old widow visiting her late husband’s grave might point out to him in minute detail what has changed on the neighboring graves since her last visit.

Description should also use all senses if possible. Our normal modus operandi is sight, which is why most of our descriptions center around things we see. But we’ve also got smell, hearing, feel, and taste (which is pretty hard to put into story but not impossible). And some people claim to have a sixth sense, perception.

A final consideration is your genre. Description can be used very well to set the tone of your novel. Description in a gritty detective story will focus on different elements in the scenes and a different, more chopped up writing style than a chick-lit story with its fluffy, feel-good descriptions. The genre also determines the amount of descriptions you need. 

Readers of Romance expect a lot of sensual descriptions mingled with strong emotions whereas Horror works with the unseen in complex settings. A heavily tech-oriented SciFi story will need more expository description (beware the pitfall here) than a coming of age story set in the real world.

Make your descriptions as varied as you can, because description is what makes your stories become a movie in the readers’ minds. Skimp on it, and your stories will fall flat no matter how engaging the characters and how intriguing the plot. Put in too much, and the reader will skip paragraphs or even whole pages.

Play Along:

Describe your room twice. The first time, pretend to be a mother fetching laundry from her son’s/daughter’s room. And second, pretend to be an alien that crashed through the window of this room, so this is the first glimpse of humanity it gets. Keep it under 100 words.

Feel free to post, and I’ll do my best to comment.

What I Learned About Writing From Bad Movies

Admit it – you’ve sat through your fair share of really bad movies. You’ve moaned and groaned and wondered why on earth you were sitting through such meaningless drivel.

But all is not lost! Those awful films were a gold mine of research. Why? Because they can teach us valuable writing lessons.

Here’s a list of truly horrible movies (made less horrible by the fact I watched them via RiffTrax because I can only take so much torture) and the valuable lesson I learned from each one.

Grizzly – A grizzly terrorizes and kills campers but they don’t want to close the park. Basically, it’s Jaws on land. Lesson – make your plot original.

Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny – Santa’s reindeer abandon Santa and at the end the Ice Cream Bunny drives his truck to rescue Santa. However, Santa could’ve at any point in time simply got out of the sled on his own and walked off the beach. Lesson – fill in those plot holes.

Roller Gator – A miniature talking gator entices a roller skating girl to hide him from bad guys. Endless insults from gator, pointless scenes and chatter, and lots of meandering. Lesson – don’t make up for a lack of plot with empty padding.

Jack Frost – Death row inmate is transformed into obviously plastic snowman and goes on killing spree. Lesson – make the villain believable.

ROTOR – Futuristic robot cop goes on killing spree in science fiction thriller. In reality, very boring and the only thing more cardboard than the acting are the sets. Lesson – don’t dress up a story as one genre and then deliver something completely different.

The Little Unicorn – A girl and her unicorn avoid detection in this star-filled film. However, most of the stars are wasted and look really bored. Lesson – give your characters something interesting to do.

Birdemic – Vanity project about killer birds with one dimensional acting and no dimensional special effects. Possibly one of the worst films in the world. Lesson – just because you think it’s brilliant doesn’t mean it is–get a second (or third or fourth) opinion.

Zindy the Swamp Boy – Drama about boy living in swamp with grandfather and eventually on his own. He dies at the end. Lesson – if your story is aimed at children, make sure it won’t scar them for life.

Sharknado 2 – Category seven hurricane spawns sharknados in New York City. (Need I say more?) Lesson – readers must buy the story concept.

The Apple – A musical about a couple entering the music industry who find weirdness, drugs, and aliens. Featuring fourteen songs in ninety minutes, it’s a failed Rocky Horror Picture Show copycat. Lesson – fancy and colorful words won’t make up for a story that makes no sense and goes nowhere.

Cool as Ice – Featuring flash in the pan rap star Vanilla Ice. 1991 never looked so bad. Lesson – don’t use elements, terms, or slang that will date your work in less than five years.

Night of the Lepus – Giant, blood-thirsty killer bunnies. (Not making this up!) Lesson – threats in your story must be believable.

The Last Shark – Giant shark terrorizes coastal town. At one point, he jumps out of the water and takes down a helicopter. Lesson – make sure your thrills and scares work and don’t cause readers to roll their eyes or laugh.

And finally…

The Star Wars Holiday Special – Chewbacca’s family waits for him to come home to celebrate Life Day. Poorly acted, heavily padded, and featuring ninety minutes of mostly Wookie cries. Lesson – never rush a story (or sequel) and toss it out there just to please others.

There you have it! Next time a terrible movie crosses your screen, sit back and learn from it. If you can stomach the awfulness and can’t find it on RiffTrax, of course.

What lessons have you learned from bad movies?