Book of Your Heart

In the previous post, we saw that sagging middles are a symptom of an underlying problem. The problem might be:

• Excitement overload resulting in content exhaustion
• Conflict avoidance
• Just plain poor plotting

Let’s look at the symptoms in a different way.

Have a hard look at your own story and your experience in writing it, and check all that apply:

• When you get to the book’s climax, has the protagonist already achieved her story goal? When did she achieve it?
• Did the protagonist achieve goals that are unrelated to the original story goal?
• Did the story goal disappear or fade as the plot progressed?
• Did you run out of ideas around chapter 4?
• Did you struggle to keep writing until you reached the book’s climax?

If any of these questions resonate with you, keep reading and we’ll discover what can be done to remedy the dreaded Sagging Middle Syndrome.

The Basics: Raise the stakes

Conflict is built directly on characters having something at stake in the story. When the conflict dies, it’s because those stakes are set aside until pulled back out again for the climax (if even then).

Conflict begins when the protagonist conceives a story goal. (Many thanks to B.K. Reeves for pounding this concept into my head years ago.)  The story goal is the one thing that must remain tantalizingly out of reach of the protagonist throughout the book — until the climax occurs.

If you’ve ever tried to accomplish something that meant anything to you, such as winning a sports tournament, finishing a difficult project, or helping someone out of a terrible situation, there’s a very good chance you were emotionally invested in the outcome. Emotional investment is ripe for conflict scenarios, because just about anything that threatens that rosy outcome can be viewed as a “problem.”

This means conflict can arise from several areas:

• From the goal itself, which may appear to be terrifically difficult or even unreachable.
• From the protagonist herself, who may be fighting guilt or a sense of inadequacy (or myriad other things).
• From other characters around the protagonist who appear to be throwing roadblocks onto the path of achieving the goal.
• From external phenomena (weather, nature, global events) that are completely out of the protagonist’s control.

Unless you’re writing an epic thousand-page novel, probably one or two of these conflict areas are sufficient. Try to layer on too much conflict and the story tends to fail in other ways (too busy, disjointed, confusing, wandering, etc.). Sometimes less is more, especially if you’re working with a 325-page or fewer manuscript.

Premature… climax

When you get to the book’s climax, has the protagonist already achieved her story goal?

This happens more frequently than you might think. Usually what happens is that the protagonist has a goal that ends up achieved in some way prior to the climax of the story.

Let’s take an example from one of my critique sessions, appropriately anonymous-ized to protect the writer and used with her permission:

Our fair heroine is part-owner of a successful catering business she inherited from her father, and is fighting to keep it small, local, and intimate, while her headstrong but sexy business partner uses legal maneuvering to attempt to sell the business to a large food service corporation with an international reach. 

Now, this looks okay on the surface. The heroine has a story goal of “save her father’s business” and there seems to be plenty of conflict with the “villain” who is also “the hero” in this romantic tale.

Then what happened around Chapter 4 was that our fair heroine found out that the would-be hero couldn’t take the business away from her due to the rock solid nature of their business agreement giving her power to block the sale — and voila! the story goal evaporated.

What followed was a good 100 pages of arguing and fighting between these two people as they struggled to figure out how to work together and resolve their differences.

Because the story goal was not maintained throughout the book, the conflict ramped down rather than up. The climax became about sorting out the last argument rather than saving the catering business.

Now, I have to say that I’ve read many, many published novels that change the story goal. Some are wildly successful because the stakes go up (see Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass).

Others, in which the stakes go down (determining who’s right about the decorations for the next wedding is not the same as losing the entire business and your reputation), feel emotionally diffuse and vague. Don’t let the story goal resolve itself too soon, or morph into something less compelling.

The case of the vanishing story goal

In this symptom, the story goal drives the plot action — until it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, it disappears from the page completely. Characters forget they’re supposed to be achieving anything, and it’s usually while in the throes of passion with the bad guy/boy next door/vampire hunter/[your favorite character type here].

The story goal functions, then, as a way to get the characters together on the page, and once that happens, it’s unconsciously retired as an unneeded device.

I don’t think I’ve ever read a NY-published novel with this problem — no editor I know would let this go.

(And let me say, too, that the goal of this particular web site is not necessarily to “get you published,” but is instead to help you “tell the most compelling story you can.” Compelling means the reader makes an emotional investment in the characters and the story outcome, and turns the last page feeling satisfied with the book and eager to buy/read the next one.)

The vanishing story goal, in my experience, falls into the realm of the conflict-avoidant writer. That eagerness for everyone in the story to get along means that rich fields of conflict (and the resulting passion) are left unplowed. More on this concept later.

What story are we in again?

Let’s go back to the catering heroine fighting to save her business from her sexy but headstrong business partner.

On a subsequent rewrite of the story, the author attempted to extend the conflict through the sagging middle by introducing a subordinate who was embezzling money from the business.

Good solution, right? The business is still at stake, isn’t it?

Well, not in the same way. And certainly not with the same power.

The nice thing about the premise of this unpublished novel was that the conflict was close to home — two business partners with very different ideas of “success”  and who were struggling over how to move forward were also falling in love. That meant there were plenty of opportunities throughout the novel to have them go head-to-head over everything — from how to manage the kitchen to how much money to spend on new equipment to whether to hire her best friend who was also a four-star chef.

But the addition of the embezzler produced an easy partnership and changed story goal – the people in conflict suddenly banded together to find the bad guy – and the story on the page lacked conflict even within that whodunit arena. The hero and heroine weren’t using the embezzlement to continue exploring their fundamental differences.

Remember that true conflict between a romantic hero and heroine equals a passionate outcome. When the reader is faced with two strongly written characters who are each invested in their own story goal, the reader feels torn and agonizes over who to root for (though she’s always rooting for “the couple”).

Just as exercising causes tears in the muscle, and the tears in the muscle make the muscle stronger, so the story conflict causes tears in the relationship that then cause the relationship – that between the characters on the page and that between the characters and the reader – to strengthen.

The embezzler idea probably would have worked if it had remained a subplot and had been another point of contention between the main characters. But it became the focus of the book’s middle and simply a distraction from the main conflict.

Some practical solutions

Your job as a writer to prevent the protagonist from:

• Achieving that goal too easily (excitement-based plotting)
• Forgetting the goal exists (conflict-avoidance plotting)
• Achieving other goals unrelated to the original, primary goal (poor plotting)

So, what can you do to prop up a sagging middle?

• Start with a strong story goal for each major character. If the story goal is weak or easily achieved, it won’t generate enough emotional heat to capture the reader’s imagination. The “easy” goals are saving someone’s life, saving one’s own life, doing something altruistic. Whatever you choose, there should be an emotional component to the success or failure to reach that goal.
• Make every scene a stepping stone toward achieving (or failing to achieve) the goal. Each scene should see the heroine thinking about or doing something about reaching her story goal. If that’s not uppermost in her mind, then the story is threatening to go astray.
• Cut or edit scenes that don’t create goal-based tension. This is another way of working with the “stepping stone” item above. If the scene has the protagonist in it but doesn’t move her toward the goal, then edit it to include that element.
• Allow the protagonist to succeed (or not) at the climax of the novel, not before. That strong story goal and the motivation behind it is fuel for the opening, the middle, and the climax. Don’t pull the story goal out from the protagonist, but instead let it drive the action until the climax when the goal is resolved.

Whew! That’s a lot of stuff to keep in mind, but I hope this article sheds some light on how to keep those middles from sagging.

We’ll tackle it again from another direction when we look at character development. But that’s another article altogether!

As always, take what you like and leave the rest. Keep writing!