Experimenting in the Middle

One of the most common complaints I hear from writers is that they’re having difficulty making any headway with the middle portion of their book. You know, that tricky post-inciting-incident part where you’re done establishing the character and introducing the main conflict but have about 50,000 words to go before you can start wrapping things up.

There are all sorts of guides out there that you can use to write a captivating opening (we’ve even written one), and there are about as many that’ll tell you how to squeeze every last possible drop of emotional impact out of your ending. But what do you do when you get to that laggy middle section of your book other than to repeat try-fail cycles until you’ve bulked up your word count enough to transition into the third act.

The reason it’s so tricky to prescribe advice for the middle is because middles are very book specific. You start with your characters at Point A and end with them having somehow gotten to Point B. In between… stuff happens. Just what that “stuff” is ultimately depends on your Point A and Point B. However, there is a little trick you can use when our worthy adversary writer’s block rears its ugly head mid-book. As unintuitive as it may seem, that trick is as follows: toss everything you know about your book completely out the window and try something different.

But that’s crazy talk. Surely, I jest. Hear me out. Have you ever been plodding along through a pretty formulaic TV show only to suddenly reach an episode where the writers seemed to have forgotten what show they were writing? May I present to you the Concept Episode. A Concept Episode is an episode of a TV show that eschews the show’s standard formula in favour of employing a novel storytelling or cinematic gimmick or exploring a new genre or tone with the same characters. Let’s very quickly go over some classic examples of concept episodes.

Seinfeld: The Betrayal

The Betrayal is also referred to by Seinfeld fans as “the backwards episode”. The gimmick of this episode is that it is presented in reverse chronological order; every time there’s a cut to a new scene, we jump back in time rather than forward.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Once More with Feeling

The most commonly occurring type of concept episode is the musical episode. This is where a show will, for the span of a single episode, inexplicably become a Broadway musical, with characters spontaneously breaking out into song. What’s so amazing about the Buffy example is that there’s an in-universe explanation for the singing bug that’s going around.

Supernatural: The French Mistake

For those not in the know, Supernatural is a horror/dark fantasy series about monster-hunting siblings Sam and Dean Winchester, played by Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles, respectively. In The French Mistake, Sam and Dean are transported to an alternate reality where Supernatural is a fictional TV show and Sam and Dean are mistaken for the actors who play them. Hilarity ensues.

What we see in our examples are works of fiction that decide to veer from or flat out break their own storytelling rules. A chronologically straightforward narrative is told in a non-chronological manner. A show that would be categorized as horror or dark fantasy becomes a musical or a meta-comedy for the duration of a single episode. It’s a sort of “what-if” exercise, where we take the characters and contexts we’re familiar with and plop them into a completely different context to see how well they translate into it.

My tip, then, is to go a little experiment-crazy during that boring middle section of the book. Play around with narrative form by making use of flashbacks, dream sequences, and POV shifts. Play around with genre by bringing to the forefront elements of horror, romance, or comedy. Play around with narrative structure by writing a chapter entirely made up of dialogue, or perhaps a chapter without any dialogue at all. Try out a different narrative voice. Try having an interaction between characters who otherwise never share any page-time. Try plopping your characters into a vastly different setting than anything they’ve encountered up until that point.

What’s the benefit of all this experimentation? Well, for one, it keeps things fresh. Throwing the occasional curve ball will prevent both you and your readers from falling into a rut of recurring “yes, buts” and “no, ands”. Trying something new also puts your characters to the test—you don’t really know your characters until you know how they’d react if you suddenly dropped them in the middle of a slasher movie, a stoner comedy, or an animated Christmas special.

So next time you find yourself stuck or tempted to go write another book, go write that other book—but do so inside the book you’re currently writing! These experiments won’t always work out; such jarring contrasts in tone and genre conventions might wind up in your scrapped chapters folder. But at the very least, moving outside of your comfort zone will get those creative juices flowing. After all, Monty Python said it best: and now for something completely different…