Tag: plot

The Dreaded Middle

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ Leave a comment

Beginnings are hard to write.

Endings are even harder to write.

But the hardest part of a book to write, hands down, is the middle.

The middle of the book is that part where ennui sets in, the part where you start to heartily dislike most of not all of your characters, or — if you still like them in spite of everything — the part where you become so tired of the fictional milieu you’ve embedded them in that you start to fantasize about lifting them out of it wholesale and giving them all jobs in a coffee shop instead.  The middle is where plots break down, where minor characters show up out of nowhere and attempt to hijack the narrative, where major characters suddenly take left turns into unmapped territory.

Sometimes the plot breakdown is obvious when you hit it, and you end up stalled for days or weeks or sometimes, heaven help you, years, until you work out what’s holding things up.  Other times, you don’t notice it until it’s time to do the revisions, and then you’re stuck doing a massive structural rewrite on a short deadline.

One way or another, with novels it’s the midgame that makes or breaks people.

Backstory, We Got Backstory

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 1 Comment

Every story has a backstory.  It’s the crucial information that you-the-reader need to know if you’re going to understand what’s happening now, in the story’s present day.  Or it’s the buried secret that shapes the character of your protagonist, or the skeleton in the family cupboard, or the Dreadful Thing that happened at college in senior year that nobody ever speaks of and nobody ever forgets.

Sometimes a plot only needs a bit of light-weight backstory work, somewhat in the nature of a trellis to support the ornamental vines of the action, the better to reassure you-the-reader that what you’re seeing has something underneath it to keep it fixed in position and to hold it up.   Other times, the backstory isn’t just there for support; it’s the heavy-duty engine that drives the entire narrative.

But no matter the relative importance of the backstory, there is one thing that the writer needs to remember:  What went on in the past of the narrative cannot be more entertaining than what’s going on in the present.  Because if it is, then the writer might as well give up on the present-day portion of the narrative entirely and concentrate on writing about all the past-era stuff that’s actually interesting.

Thought for the Day

~ drdoyleeditorial ~ 2 Comments

I’m personally of the opinion that revenge is morally dubious as all hell; but it undeniably makes a great story engine for a piece of fiction.  It gives your character a large and important (and possibly dangerous) goal to work toward; it implies an interesting backstory of some variety; it insures that your character is either going to have to get off his duff and do something or at the very least spend some interesting screen time justifying the fact that he isn’t; and it provides lots of hooks on which to hang moral and ethical and social debate if you go in for that sort of thing.

As plot devices go, you can’t beat it with a stick.