Re-writing the same book a couple dozen times is a bit like getting an X-ray of your whole skeleton. You have a good sense of what you look like covered in muscle and skin and clothes, but things look different when you get down to the bone. It can be a little unsettling (I say this as a person who’s had more X-rays in the past two years than most people have in a lifetime) to see the body you’re otherwise familiar with reduced to its most fundamental structure.
The same thing tends to happen in the process of revision, especially when you’re working with an editor. In some ways, an editor’s approach is the opposite of the author’s: while the writer tends to start with the meat, working through the tender layers of character and theme and aesthetic until their teeth crack against something solid, a good editor will usually start with the skeleton, with the scaffolding. No sense doing cosmetic work if the thing isn’t structurally sound. Most authors have some idea where their story starts and some idea where it ends, but the middle? That’s where things tend to get, well, squishy.
We’ve talked about this briefly already, kicked around a few strategies for finding your way through a thicket of narrative possibilities, but that approach is a little backwards, too. We started with the “how” instead of the “what,” mostly because the “what” of the middle is a lot less obvious than the beginning or the end. The beginning is the inciting incident, the thing that marks this moment as different from all the moments that came before it, the moment that pushes a character out the door on their big adventure, and at the same time pulls the reader in. The end is also called a “resolution,” where everything comes to a head, the momentum which has (hopefully) been gathering all along reaching a climax where choices are made and fates are decided and the book can, again, be closed. But what, exactly, is the middle of the story supposed to do?
It’s a difficult question to answer, but I’ve been chewing on it lately as I work through last revisions of Hot Wax. I’ve been through half a dozen different versions of the book in the past few months, honing in on the most effective structure for the narrative. We reworked the beginning and the end, bringing them into alignment. But something about the middle was still stubbornly lacking. As T. wrote in the margins a few drafts back, “This feels like you asking yourself where the story should go.” He wasn’t wrong, and he gave me a nudge to take another crack at it, to go big or go home.
So I went big. I went wild. I ignored all the guardrails, threw caution to the wind and put the pedal to the floor. I tried something that seemed completely fucking crazy, but the craziest part is that it completely worked. It needs to be refined, of course, but swinging for the fences from The Middle changed the whole game. Changed the whole book. Made everything else—including that beginning and end—come alive in a whole new way. It was like a freak triple play at the bottom of the sixth to tie the game and get everyone on the edge of their seats again just when they were starting to get a little too comfortable calling the outcome.
And that, my friends, is exactly what the middle is for.
Here’s where I admit that this is not an isolated incident in my writing career. My biggest rewrite of Villains involved a similar editorial intervention where my editor said, in so many words, “The stakes need to be higher. Now that the reader’s come this far, why do they have to keep reading?” Having gotten the same feedback on two novels now, I’ve been mulling this over, wondering why I have trouble anticipating weak, wobbly middles at the outlining stage. I think it has something to do with the way we talk about “hooking” the reader from the start, like a fish on a line. The way we talk about endings that are satisfying, like making a meal of that fish that you caught at the end of the day. But we never seem to talk about reeling those fish in once they’re hooked.
One of my own revision philosophies is something I call the “state of play” approach (probably drawing in some nebulous way on Richard Schechner’s performance theory, a very good read for all literary creatures). To avoid overwriting, the rule I’ve adopted for my fiction is that if something, be it a scene or a paragraph or even a sentence, doesn’t change the state of play and move the story forward, it shouldn’t be there. But this is a subtraction approach; What if I applied the same idea to the eternal struggle of the soft, formless Middle and insisted on something game-changing? And as soon as I did that it all became blindingly obvious. The middle can’t just be a waystation between the beginning and the end. If you want to keep a reader reading, the middle must mark a point of no return. Something has to happen after which everything changes, and there’s no going back to the way things were.
Let’s use Macbeth as a concrete example. The inciting incident is, of course, Enter Three Witches to tell Macbeth he will be king of Scotland. The end is Macbeth beheaded as a tyrant and the “rightful” heir installed on the throne in his place. The actual regicide doesn’t happen until halfway through Act II, and exactly one act later Lady Macbeth has the same thought I just did, more or less: “Things without all remedy / Should be without regard. What’s done is done” (3.2.13-4).1 The murder of Duncan makes for a hell of a middle: they kill their king and after that, nothing is the same. Crucially, there’s no “remedy,” no Ctrl+Z, no take-backsies. Macbeth regrets the murder the instant he commits it, but what’s done is done. The wheels are in motion.
Interestingly, he starts to sound more and more like his wife as the play goes on, and expands on this notion two scenes later when he says, “I am in blood / Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er” (3.4.168-70). That tedium is exactly what he and I are trying to avoid. He too, is describing the middle, or the middle as it should be: something has irrevocably changed, and you’re in so deep that you can’t go back, so the only way now is forward, onward, seeing it through to the end. That’s the feeling I talked about in our last post about endings, the irrepressible momentum that should sweep the reader up and gather speed until the climax.
If we could start thinking of middles this way from the jump, we’d save ourselves and our editors a lot of grief down the line. A middle isn’t just how you get from Point A to Point B, but the urgent, undeniable thing which forces you to leave the beginning behind and strike out towards the end. You should feel like Macbeth, with the king’s blood of your hands and fear in your heart but no choice but to carry on, even—or especially—with a growing sense that you might not like where you’re headed. Too late. No going back. What’s done is done.
How much more exciting, to conceive of the middle this way. Something BIG has to happen, something so big that the world the reader knows turns upside-down, but they’ve caught feelings for the characters and they’ll be biting their nails down to the nub to find out not just what happens next, but oh, my God, What happens NOW? We tend to save our big reveals for the end: go out with a bang or in a blaze of glory, insert your cliché of choice here. Readers expect big reveals and Holy shit! moments in the final pages. But smack in the middle? They won’t see it coming, so rip the rug right out from under them. You thought you knew where this was going? Not anymore. Keep reading to find out.
It’ll be some months yet before I’m putting new ideas down in an outline, but I’m already feeling things out. And I’m going to approach the next novel differently—starting, perhaps, with the middle. If nothing else I’ve got my eye on that point of no return, the thing there’s no coming back from. It might save me—and maybe you—a lot of editorial angst down line to adopt Shakespeare’s structural style:2 The king is dead. What now?
William Shakespeare, Macbeth, edited by Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library), https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/macbeth/. All references are to this edition.
Notably, this structure isn’t only at work in the Scottish play. Caesar and Romeo and Juliet, for instance, also use this model of a major death in the middle of the play which changes everything. Interestingly, Romeo and Juliet is actually structure just like a comedy until Mercutio dies and then it does a wild left-turn into tragedy. You can learn a lot about story structure from the Bard, which is why I used him as a model for Villains.
I wan to know so badly what big thing you did in the middle of Hot Wax!!!! My middles are a nightmare!
If you're comfortable sharing....I'm super curious where you felt that "middle" began and ended in Villains, i.e., what plot point(s) were added to keep the tension up. You did such a great job of weaving in innuendos and foreshadowed events that it is difficult to unravel (as it should).