Have you ever felt impatient listening to a co-worker, friend or spouse relate a story? While you were listening, did you mentally drum your fingertips and think to yourself, get to the point!
If you’ve had that feeling, then you know how I feel while reading many middle scenes in many manuscripts. They can be flabby. They stall around. They take their time. They work up to something, or try to, and sometimes that something is less than terrific. Dialogue meanders, interrupted by pointless pencil twirling and tone of voice emphasis. There’s plenty of discussion but little tension. Instead of mood there is fog. Twists and turns lack centrifugal force. Revelations occur in mid-paragraph. The POV character could be anyone.
WHERE PROCESS GOES WRONG
Why do middle scenes fall into a coma? Is it because such scenes inherently lack drama? Is it because the point of such scenes is not action but something else? Is it because the purpose of the middle is to deepen dilemmas and build rising tension, especially the inner peril of protagonists? Actually, I think middles scenes suck not because of content but because of process. Middle scenes often are written not with the intention to create a planned effect, but out of a need to discover the scene’s point in the first place.
You can tell that’s the case when a scene wanders in. We get what in movies is called an establishing shot: a picture of where we are. The protagonist or POV character enters. The action—such as it is—is described visually, as if we are watching through a camera lens. Where dialogue should commence, a discussion starts. What a protagonist or POV character wants isn’t clear or gets lost. The big revelation feels more like repetition. Surprises may snap open like Christmas crackers, but the pop fades as we must slog through a few more pages.
What’s happening is that the author began writing the scene with a mental picture of what’s happening, then proceeded in linear fashion through the next twenty or thirty story minutes, trying to twist a chronology of that duration into a tight dramatic event. That approach mostly doesn’t work. Twenty or thirty minutes of real time are not all dramatic. The same goes for twenty or thirty minutes of fictional time, and certainly not for twelve to fifteen pages of manuscript time.
A NON-LINEAR APPROACH
The solution is not to make chapters short, although there is—trust me—not a middle scene in any manuscript which could not afford to lose a few words. One solution, rather, is to take a non-linear approach, building a scene from the inside out. Knowing the purpose, point and effect of a scene in advance isn’t necessary. It’s okay not to know much about a scene before writing it but transcribing a video tape of twenty or thirty imaginary minutes will probably only reveal a lot of words that you don’t need.
Instead, try discovering the elements that make any scene dramatic in advance, thinking ahead instead of hacking through. What makes a scene dramatic? If a middle scene is not action-packed, then much of the work is done by dialogue. Tension arises not because of physical danger but in the transaction between two people. Asking and resistance. Appeal and denial. Seduction and succumbing. Orders and mutiny.
That’s what we see on the surface. However, when any two people talk with each other there are hidden agendas. There are extra layers, meaning that what humans believe they want is not the same as what they actually are seeking.
Dialogue is a dance. Who is leading, who is following? Who has power, begs, insists, demands, denies, manipulates, twists, entices, teases, plays games, speaks from the heart, dodges responsibility, submits to a whipping, or rises to the moment? What is your protagonist really asking for? What is his or her opposition actually hoping to get?
TRUE SUSPENSE
The mild tension in flabby middle scenes often derives from pure worry. Plot problems are okay, don’t get me wrong, but hand-wringing about them is the weakest form of tension. More electric than what is happening externally in a story is what is happening to a protagonist. The uncertainty of our existence—who we are and what that means for us—is the greatest form of suspense.
Strong middle scenes are not reported from the outside but experienced from the inside. Close third person POV takes us part way there. Immersive, experiential POV, though, does a more thorough job. Suspense is strongest not when we see through another’s eyes, or hear through another’s ears, but when we feel a character’s fear and wonder, especially when those feelings are handled in a way that’s fresh.
WHAT CHANGE REALLY MEANS
Stories are about long-term change; scenes enact temporary change. There are many ways to make temporary change. Realizations about self or others. Insights into a situation. New information, especially when that information goes against what we expect. Still, information is just information. What gives it impact—the force of surprise—is its timing, delivery and import, meaning its meaning.
Anything that suddenly alters the story circumstances, or what must be done, or which switches, distorts, deepens, turns, reverses or explodes a protagonist’s understanding of anything, is a surprise. Big or small, without some type of surprise a scene will fall flat. On the other hand, properly placed a surprise will feel to readers like the scene’s point. In the surprise, the reader will sense meaning.
What triggers surprises? Surprises can drop from the sky or can well up from inside. It’s fine when they’re delivered like pizza but are most effective when characters reveal things that they previously kept hidden—even kept hidden from self. What’s nice about that is that the supply of self-revelation is inexhaustible.
Unreliable narrators aren’t needed to shock us. Surprise can arrive in a box from anyone who has much to learn about the world, others, self and what the hell is really going on.
THE NON-LINEAR METHOD
Let’s turn those thoughts about middle scenes into a plan of action: a non-linear process of building a scene from the inside out. Choose a scene from the middle of your WIP. Put into mind what happens, but don’t look back at the text you’ve already got.
Remembering that dialogue does much of the work, first think about the two people who will primarily interact. What does each want? For your protagonist or POV character, that is the scene goal. The person who wants something different is the scene antagonist.
However, there’s a layer beneath that for each. For your protagonist, that isn’t the overt want, but what he or she really wants. Deep down. Underneath. Fundamentally. Emotionally. Same for the other character, the scene antagonist.
Step One: Before anything else, write the dialogue in which those two characters each go after what they actually want. Directly. Cutting through the clutter. Down to brass tacks. No holds barred. Do not lead into it. Do not bother with incidental action. Minimize attributives. What’s really going on here? What is each actually trying to get from the other to satisfy, sooth, elevate, affirm, protect or enhance the self? Who wins? How do we know?
Next, let’s look at two types of change that might occur in the scene. The first is how plot circumstances change. What occurs, or is learned, during this twenty or thirty minutes will radically alter what your protagonist knows, assumes, or that he or she must do? What has been held back? What has not been revealed until now? What bombshell can you explode? What’s the Black Swan, the news that cannot possibly be foreseen?
Now let’s look at character surprises. What doesn’t your protagonist yet know about someone else in the scene, or someone in the tale who is not present? What did your protagonist get wrong? How did your protagonist misjudge? What would shock your protagonist to learn? Not sure about those things? Make something up.
Step Two: Write the moment in which that bombshell explodes: both the explosion and what the shock wave does, visibly and audibly, to your protagonist and others in the scene.
Now let’s look at internal change. What can your protagonist discover or reveal about self in this scene? What secret shame? What undisclosed need? What private knowledge? What prior role? What past association? What dimension of any of those things can be revealed, deepened or seen anew in this scene?
What about purely internal changes? What shortcoming or strength does this scene show your protagonist? In what way is his or her identity, in this moment, becoming different? How is the world no longer the way that he or she imagined? How is he or she no longer the self that he or she hopes to be?
Step Three: Write a paragraph capturing the change to self, or in self-understanding.
Step Four: Create a zinger last line. A shock, insult, slap in the face, threat, buzzkill, warning, sudden clarity, deep comfort, leap in status, dots connecting, new question with no answer, or any kind of cliffhanger whether actual or emotional.
When you have all of the above elements in hand, write a 750-word version of the scene. Use what you came up with—and as little else as possible. What should result is a trimmed down version of the scene that does not just record the scene’s chronological progress but that maximizes its impact; a scene grounded in the emotional imperatives and genuine surprises that are the scene’s true reason to be.
Should your manuscript be composed of 750-word scenes? I don’t think so, but I do think the scenes in your manuscript’s middle can be mined for drama and be fully focused for effect. Thinking in a non-linear way is a good way to do that.
In the middle scene you chose, what is your protagonist’s true need? What bombshell did you drop? What revelations arose? What’s your zinger last line?
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About Donald Maass
Donald Maass is president of the Donald Maass Literary Agency. He has written several highly acclaimed craft books for novelists including The Breakout Novelist, The Fire in Fiction, Writing the Breakout Novel and The Career Novelist.
Bookmarking for revisions I’ll be doing later this year. Thanks, Don.
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Most welcome, Erin. Thanks for all you do to make these monthly posts magically appear.
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You must be confusing me with someone more helpful. I tweet or share on FB when I think a post will really help other writers in my life, but I have nothing to do with getting posts up on the Writer Unboxed website. :)
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You’re right, scrambled thinking. I’ve had coffee now. Thanks are due to Kim Bullock who preps the daily posts for WU.
Thank you, Kim!
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Good Morning Don and thank you for this extended post.
Here’s the ending of a scene I’m working on:
“What’s a better word than boom? I don’t know. It made this stupendous sound as it hit and I could feel the impact through my feet. A knee-high cloud of dust came up that I walked through without hesitating. I wanted to see the wreckage. I wanted to see a crunched beer can squirting oil with a detached arm wriggling a few feet from it. Reaching down I swatted at the dust as I walked forward, but I stopped at the…it’s still hard for me to describe it. Everything that is me shut down like my brain evaporated. All my muscles locked up and there was this blinding fear that erased the whole world except for the robot’s head with its orange painted eyes and smile tilting up out of the dust.”
My MC was starting to feel safe in this scene before I took it away from him. The bombshell in this case was a robot dropping off a canyon wall to get to him. The zinger is him losing grip on his mind right as the robot sits up.
Anyway, thanks again for the post and I hear you’ll be up my way soon.
Would you like to grab a coffee?
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What you’re doing in that passage is using immersive POV: not just what happens but how it is experienced. Nice job. I like the zinger too.
Coffee, yes! And not just because I always say yes to coffee. Didn’t I respond to your e-mail? In any event, definitely.
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Sounds good.
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I must confess, I have a love-hate relationship with your posts. I love the laser-sharp insight, but hate how it makes me doubt every scene I’ve written. I have to keep reminding myself that that’s a good thing. Right? Right? Back to the drawing board I go.
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Right. Back to the drawing board. Better middle scenes are a good thing.
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“Strong middle scenes are not reported from the outside but experienced from the inside.” One of many many gems here. Thank you for this, Don. It’s a seminar in itself.
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You are pre-registered. You can attend remotely. Homework is optional but recommended.
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Smiling
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Hi Don – I should’ve known better, but I was actually feeling a little smug when I clicked to this post. Middle scenes? Ha—I’m working on ending scenes. And non-linear? I could tell a tale or two about non-linear. So I got my coffee, settled in, aaaand…
Nope. Got my writerly ass handed to me. Meandering scenes? Got ‘em. Tension built off of hand-wringing alone? Yeah, at times. Discussion in lieu of more revealing dialog? Well, maybe sort of, but gimme a break… Sigh. Damn, so much work to be done. So much to learn.
This one really hit home: “We get what in movies is called an establishing shot: a picture of where we are. The protagonist or POV character enters. The action—such as it is—is described visually, as if we are watching through a camera lens.” Oh, I am so busted.
And not with a sagging middle scene. I did this just yesterday! On an ending scene. But I realized I was thinking of the scene as a building block – something to construct on the way to a finished product. Sort of like wham-bam framing rather than solid carpentry.
Here’s the funny part. Your post had me searching through a stack of notes on my desk, trying to prove to myself that I’d done the non-linear work you recommend. I *had* done a simple POV character’s Goal, Motivation, Conflict, Crisis breakdown. Which was as mechanical as the scene turned out. Then among the mess, I spotted another note. One I’d written over the weekend. It had a snippet of dialog. Two lines exchanged by my primary protagonists as they head into action. I’d completely forgotten. It’s not just that I neglected to incorporate it. I lost the deeper meaning in the process.
The scene as it stands is merely linear beats, all external. I’d have been better off skipping all of the action and just adding my two lines with a bit of context. It’s funny, I’d gotten to the heart of things beforehand (while in character mode), but in my workmanlike haste (read: plot mode) to get closer to “The End,” I fell into an action coma (rather than a flabby middle scene coma). Back to work! Thanks for the writerly ass kicking.
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Now you’ve got me curious: What are those two lines of dialogue??
Guess I’ll find out. Looking forward to that.
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Good morning, Don, another great post for help with editing.
“In what way is his or her identity, in this moment, becoming different? How is the world no longer the way that he or she imagined?”
Reading a novel is forming a relationship with characters, especially the MC. Challenge is required, questioning and wonder. Your methods stress the unveiling of inner thoughts that lead to decisions and action. And it’s not always a BIG SURPRISE, but a subtle turn, a character’s realization that has the biggest impact. The MC is changing and that will spread and upend what the reader was expecting–because why continue to read if the reader can predict the story? Thanks.
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There you go. Character turns are best when they’re not what we expect. Go forth…in non-linear fashion, of course.
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Thank you, Don, for this alone…”Unreliable narrators aren’t needed to shock us. Surprise can arrive in a box from anyone who has much to learn about the world, others, self and what the hell is really going on.”
Dee Willson
Author of A Keeper’s Truth and GOT (Gift of Travel)
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Glad you like that. And if you figure out what the hell is really going on…hey, put it in your manuscript. We could use some clarity.
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Have you been looking over my shoulder?
Every single book, I fall into the Pit of Despair (Princess Bride ref.), a.k.a. the middle.
You just showed me a map to circumnavigate it.
Thank you for your wisdom. I save every post you do.
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Ah, the Pit of Despair…funny how often we fall into it.
To quote the Man in Black: “Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”
Gotta love Princess Bride. So many great quotes.
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Yup, this one’s a keeper. I have a folder full of them. Every time I re-read one, I get an activating jolt which leads to more ideas than I can use. Thanks, Don, and WU!
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Welcome, Lloyd!
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I used to write flash fiction once a week. They started as stream-of-conscious writing with an interesting character, setting, action, and a purpose. They were super short, but I would always stop to let my mind percolate to come up with the ending. Within a day or two something would pop into my head that would twist the plot and surprise the reader. Sometimes it came down to the last line. These micro-fictions were the opposite of linear and revealed something shocking about the character. I try to keep this technique in mind when writing novels. Is this what you’re talking about?
Thanks, Don!
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Flash fiction does cause one to boil down to essentials, and highlights the power of last lines. Good point.
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Hello Don.
“The uncertainty of our existence–who we are and what that means for us–is the greatest form of suspense.” For me, that’s the essence of your post today. Characters in whom the sense of contingency and uncertainty is missing can’t be fully realized lead characters, and can’t generate real suspense. And as often as not, this missing part is a key attribute in antagonists–they are full of certainty, confidence, etc.
Thought-provoking as usual. Thank you.
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Thanks, Barry, and for your thoughts.
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“Dialogue is a dance.” I love that! Not to put you on the spot, but can you recommend a few books that you feel have great dialogue?
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Try Jeffrey Eugenides, Elmore Leonard, Mary Doria Russell, Scott Lynch, Janet Evanovich, Nick Hornby…we could be here all day!
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Once again, I feel like you must have been looking over my shoulder. I’m in the middle if my steampunk werewolf Victorian detective novel (second of the series). Been struggling to keep a unified feel while dealing with multiple victims, red herrings and possible motives. Needed to have my character accept an invitation to a dinner party for plot reasons, but coudon’t come up with a reason as it would be out of character. Realized I could fix it by having the man giving the invitation (Brown) make a surprisingly deep analysis of Royston’s inner life. Royston realizes that A. Brown is right and B. He’s not the antagonist Royston assumed he was.
Rough snippet of. Town’s dialogue:
“You spent so much time proving you could go somewhere that you never thought about what you would do when you got there. You spent so much time proving that you were as good as anybody else that you don’t know what to do now that we’ve agreed with your assertion.”
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Tighten that second sentence?
“You spent so much time proving you were as good as anybody else that you didn’t realize no one cares.”
Or…
“…that you’re better.”
Or…
“…that everyone’s already sold.”
That said, I love how the subtext breaks through.
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Thanks for the help. Still working on the exact wording. . .’already sold’ would be great if it didn’t sound like such a modern idiom.
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Don, I’ve been reading Peter Heller’s “The Painter,” and though there’s much to like about the book (a dynamic protagonist with a dark side, some baleful antagonists, tangled love interests), the middle to two-thirds of the book has sagged for me, and your post crystalizes why.
It’s that the protagonist has too, too much interior dialog where he is hand-wringing: Am I a bad person? Was I always a bad person? Was it this one terrible event in my life that made me a bad person?” The author needs him to reflect on those things, but there’s just too much of it for me. Those parts sag.
I’m coming round the corner on the book, and Heller has the skill (and the character lineup and established plot) to bring me around, but now I have some resistance. You capsulized it well with the “… plenty of discussion but no tension” line. (As an aside, I loved Heller’s “The Dog Stars” from beginning to end.)
We won’t discuss my own flabby novel middles, out of discretion and taste.
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Haven’t read The Dog Stars. Must do so!
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Hi Don, I’ve been lucky enough to join you in many workshops and I can say that your post today gave me as much insight as any lesson I’ve ever heard. It is the motivation I need to get back to work.
. Thanks, “Teach”
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Welcome!
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Hi, Don:
My only caveat about this approach is that it addresses the scene in isolation, instead of in context. That context should be necessary to establish how much of what you so often find lacking is, in fact, missing. That said, here goes:
I ventured down the muddy gravel away from Pritchard’s shack and toward the second, larger edifice down the lane. The wind whipped my damp clothes like laundry on a line, while the wet ground stank like an oozing bog.
As the farmhouse grew nearer in the darkness—front windows lit dully behind pleated muslin curtains, the same dog as before with his miserable barking, lunging again and again at the rattling, chest-high chain-link fence bordering the front yard—I noticed the shadowed hulk of a snub-nose truck tractor, the kind used to haul freight trailers, parked on a concrete slab at the rear. A ramshackle barn and a few sheds lay about thirty yards beyond that.
Places to run, perhaps. Spots to hide. Maybe Georgie had scampered back there, found a way to get inside one or the other, if only to escape the rain while waiting for me to find her.
No sooner did I turn that direction to investigate than the front door of the house slammed open.
A tugboat in pigtails appeared—short, squat, powerful, even in silhouette—a shotgun tucked against her hip. She stormed down the porch steps, thick-soled wellies clomping on the wet planks.
She muttered sidelong to the dog: “Hush now.” To my astonishment, it obeyed.
I raised my arms, exposed my empty hands. “I mean no harm. I’m not a threat.”
As you can imagine, after all that nasty business with Pritchard, I wondered myself if that was true. Even if it was, did it matter?
She stopped, the barrel of the gun pointed straight at my chin.
“I already know what you are.”
She squinted into the darkness beyond me, and if I’d had a mind to I could have taken the gun away from her right there. But I lacked the spite. In a deeply shadowed corner of my mind, I readied myself to die at her hands. If not for Georgie…
The woman’s eyes came back and met mine, her pigtails swaying. “Inside. Now. I ain’t asking.”
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“A tugboat in pigtails.” Great line. I could picture her immediately.
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Actually, I was going to say the same thing here, David. I think Don’s approach is terrific to help tighten flabby scenes but I find that writing them out of context or sequence in a non-linear fashion makes for a tremendous amount of editing. I tend to write in a very lean style anyway so a 750 word scene isn’t a challenge for me, or going to the heart of the problem. My big challenge is the opposite–to be less direct, more nuanced, crafty about the way I reflect emotion and conflict in everything around the protag to trigger them to act or change. I’d love to see what Don has to say about working from that angle as well.
Also, love your sample!
And an interesting post, Don!
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Heather-
I heartily recommend looking at scenes–even individual pages–out of context, examining them in new ways. More work? Perhaps. I suspect that hacking through, tweaking around words, in the end is the more time-consuming path to revision.
On the other hand, if your challenge is to be more expansive, nuanced, “crafty” (I get you), then a reductive approach isn’t what’s needed. But why not a “nuance” pass? Why not and “emotional surprise” draft?
Linear read-throughs have their place, but so do targeted, issue-specific attacks on pages, scenes and whole manuscripts. Ask me.
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“Inside. Now. I ain’t asking.”
Really, I don’t need any context for that!
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Sorry. The formatting got lost in transmission.
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This is a great zinger last line:
“So,” he said. “What’s your major?” (Lippman)
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Isn’t that a pick-up line? (If so, it may be the last line of that bar exchange!)
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It’s from What the Dead Know. And page 125 of Writing 21st Century Fiction.
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LOL. Busted. Must read my own book!
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Thank you very much for this post. It brought down a revelation about the protagonist in the story I am working on. This will hugely influence the middle scene. Incidentally, the story’s title is The Bomb. :-)
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Not “Da Bomb”? Kidding. Glad to help.
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Your post made me think of something Angela Thirlwell wrote in her “biography” Rosalind: Shakespeare’s Immortal Heroine
“Choosing the name ‘Ganymede’ impels Rosalind over so many borders. From girl to boy; from court to exile; from urban to pastoral; from insider to outsider; from poetry to prose. Her choice also somersaults the play from the tragedy of realpolitik at court to the comedy of love in Arden…”
If all we see is Rosalind in male attire, there is little to keep the audience interested. What has us on the edge of our seats is her experience of crossing these borders – the wonder of her new-found freedom away from the court and being treated as a man, the risk she takes in encouraging Orlando to court ‘her’ in jest while she is Ganymede playing at being Rosalind, as well as the myriad other layers in the subtext of the words.
I’ve found your exercises on third-level emotions are effective in avoiding the sagging of the saga on a scene-by-scene basis.
Thanks Don, lots of food for thought!
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Mr. Shakespeare knew a thing or two about scene construction, character layers and zinger lines, I’d say. Thanks.
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Good lord your stuff is so good. I can’t think of anyone else who gives back to struggling writers as much as you do. The only problem is what previous posters alluded to — I now have to convince myself I’m up to such a monumental task. So off to re-read Chapter 7 of The Emotional Craft of Fiction (AFTER I finish one middle scene’s worth of work), which always offers me perspective. Thanks, Don.
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Thanks, Don. I am adding this to my “to be consulted during editing” folder. We worked briefly on it in your workshop, but I am delighted to have it spelled out here. I’m finding that thinking about the purpose of the scene in this way is helping every scene, not just my sagging middles.
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You had me at “black swan.” ☺️ And wow, as usual you give writers so much gold. Every single question you ask us to consider is worth asking in every part of a manuscriot, not just the middles. Thank you so much!! ❤️
-Birgitte Necessary
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I just stumbled across your post. I rarely read blog posts because I simply don’t make the time. However, since my book is due in six days, procrastination is rearing its head and well….
Anyway, this was incredibly helpful. I’ve never considered writing in a non-linear way, but I find the idea intriguing and plan to give it a try with the next story. :)
Bookmarking this blog so I don’t miss anymore of your posts. Thanks!
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