RUNNING THE MIDDLES

by John M. Floyd

The title for this piece is both a sports term and an agricultural term — they mean two entirely different things — but I’d like to apply it today to a third area that I know at least a little more about than either football or farming.

Much has been written, at this blog and elsewhere, about beginnings and endings. I think story openings are fun to read and to write, and endings are even more so.

Middles are another matter.

A fellow writer once told me she suspected that she knew the reason why I prefer to create short fiction rather than longer works. She said everyone knows beginnings and endings can be enjoyable to write, and even easy to write — but middles are not. They’re hard. And while the middle of a novel can be two or three hundred pages long, the middle of a short story is, well, short. She had a point, there. It’s easier to wade across a creek than swim across a river. Janet Evanovich once said: “I could write a book in a month if it wasn’t for the middle.”

One thing is certain, however. For a novel or a short story to be successful, whatever you plant in that middle ground better keep the reader’s attention. The death knell for many a piece of fiction is that its middle — Act II, if you want to call it that — doesn’t sustain the interest and suspense that’s been generated in the opening, and things start to bog down a bit. In fact one of the few things worse than a slow opening is a thrilling opening that loses its momentum in the pages that follow.

How do you make sure things keep clipping along at a good pace? There is unfortunately no secret to doing that, but a good rule to follow is make things worse. Make your protagonist suffer. Threaten and challenge him right away, and afterward heap even bigger threats and changes and challenges onto his back. In some of the best stories and books, things don’t begin to improve for him until he’s finally hit bottom. It’s the old three-part story formula, beginning/middle/end: (1) put a guy up a tree, (2) throw rocks at him, and (3) get him down. And the bigger the rocks are, the better.

A prime example is Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity. First we find that Jason Bourne has amnesia, which is bad enough. Then we learn (and he learns) that people are trying to kill him. Could things get much worse that that? Well, in the Ludlum world they can, because Bourne then discovers that most of the people trying to kill him work for his own government. He’s alone and isolated, a situation that we crime/suspense readers relish. The ending is good too, but I believe the reason for that novel’s success is its middle — the steady buildup of tension that keeps us spellbound and rooting for the main character.

I love the statement by Alfred Hitchcock, about maintaining suspense throughout a story. I’m paraphrasing here, but Hitch said a foolproof method is to introduce a “ticking bomb.” If a group of guys are playing poker, he said, and the reader or viewer finds out there’s a bomb under the table, tension is a given. The men might be laughing or joking or chatting about sports or women or whatever, but none of that matters. The audience will be on the edge of their seats the whole time — because there’s a bomb under the table. And the beauty of this technique is that the threat doesn’t actually have to be a bomb; it just needs to be a countdown or a looming deadline of some kind: an impending trial, an approaching meteor, a child-custody decision date, a terrorist’s ultimatum, a bank debt coming due, a ransom demand, an enemy arriving in town at high noon, anything that’s always there in the background during the progress of the story, making the reader uneasy and waiting and watchful.

Aside from setting the timer on explosive devices, what things should you as a writer try to accomplish, in that treacherous middle ground of your story? Here are a few, taken from James Scott Bell’s book Plot and Structure:

• Deepen the characters
• Stretch the tension
• Raise the stakes
• Keep readers worried
• Build toward the ending

Sounds easy, right? It’s not.

But the great writers sure make it look that way.