Video Transcript: I've been talking about fast starts and how to grab your reader's attention right away. Well, after you do that, you want to keep their attention throughout the middle of the novel or other story.
And by middle, I mean basically everything after the first chapter or first few chapters where you
grab their attention and maybe get to the inciting incident where the plot really takes off.
To keep from having a saggy middle or a bland middle, you want to have plenty of action,
drama, tension – basically lots of plot.
Some years back, I was ghostwriting a novel about a famous girl sleuth. I set it on a paleontology dig, because I thought that would make a really great setting. I think it was an interesting setting, but apparently I got a little bit too much into the details of daily life on a dig. The editor read the first draft and said I needed to pull back on some of that almost nonfiction information, have more action, and maybe use the desert setting more.
I trimmed some of the scenes where they are in the heat and scraping away at the dirt and so forth. The main character and her friends, they know somebody has been stealing bones from this paleontology dig. I added a scene where they hear a noise in the night. They sneak out to follow this light that's traveling off through the desert, with their flashlights off so they won't be seen. They get out there away from camp the light suddenly goes out they discover that
somebody has removed the batteries from their flashlights. Then they look around and see eyes glowing in the dark.
Which sounds more dramatic: daily life on a paleontology dig, scraping away in the dirt under the hot sun, or surrounded by coyotes lost in the desert and the dark?
Not every book is going to have that kind of action scene, but look for ways to add danger and excitement. These things help keep those middles feeling like they're rushing forward and the reader wants to keep turning pages.
Abigail Samoon, an agent with Red Fox Literary Agency, said during a workshop, “A likable character plus a bad situation builds the most tension. Be the hero's worst enemy. Be mean. Keep heaping on the tension and don't stop with one or two things. Up the stakes on the character.”
This can be challenging, because we tend to like our characters. We don't necessarily want them to suffer, so we may instinctively protect them a little bit. This is especially true with children's book authors, because adult writers often have that instinct to protect children.
But children are inspired by reading about characters who face really difficult challenges, work through them, and succeed by themselves, based on their own actions.
That is true for adults as well. We like reading about characters who are struggling and who overcome adversity. So think about whether you're being too nice to your character. If you should actually be a little bit harder on them, you might want to go back and rework those sections.
Exercise:
Ask: Are you too nice to your main character?
Do they face danger, physical danger, social danger, or both? Do they have to face danger in what they're doing?
Do you have surprises, betrayals, twists? You don't necessarily need a betrayal specifically, but you want things that will surprise the reader, which usually means it's surprising the main character as well. You want the action to twist and go off in new directions so that you can really keep your reader's attention.
That is it for this lesson. Next time I'll come back and we'll really dig into the main character’s,
goal, motivation, and conflict in order to keep those middles action packed.
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