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Today’s post is by author and book coach Kristin Melville.
Story structure promotes the concept that every scene of your story should serve a larger purpose—e.g., the inciting incident sparks the problem, and the climax eventually brings everything to a head. Your plot should act like a Rube Goldberg machine: an intricate design of turning points that need to be hit correctly. If a single domino tile isn’t in alignment with the hammer that will push the bowling ball onto the track, the machine fails.
Maintaining forward momentum is vital. No piece can be misplaced.
You’ve undoubtedly heard of countless theories about story structure, all with different names: Three Act Structure, Save The Cat, and Kishotenketsu, to name a few. No matter the name, all plot structures prescribe milestones of change your characters need to hit to fit into your genre.
Middles are especially hard because, even when you study structure, the beginning and endings are more regimented and obvious. Unfortunately, that can mean the larger—and just as important—middle is left sagging.
So what do you need to succeed?
The Stake Shift
Plot can be seen as a series of small problems that connect to the main story question. Set up clear milestones the reader can follow. As long as your characters aim toward a goal, your story has structure.
It helps to create a plot point roughly halfway through your manuscript that you can aim toward. Perhaps your middle sags because this does not exist in your story. Often referred to as the midpoint, I call this point the Stake Shift, because while the fundamental story question doesn’t change, the intensity and our understanding of the story (not necessarily the characters’ understanding) changes.
Take the original trilogy of Star Wars from the 1970s and 1980s. All three movies focus on rebels undermining the Galactic Empire, but the ending of the second film is littered with climactic shake-ups. Han Solo gets frozen in carbonite, Luke Skywalker loses a hand, and Darth Vader utters those five fateful words: “No, I am your father.”
Now that’s a stake shift.
Planning this shift as soon as possible allows you to become less blindsided by murky middle problems. Even if you’re not the type to work with an outline, try to plan a high point of meaningful change. Not only will this show readers you have good instincts for storytelling, but it can help you diagnose story problems later on.
What might a stake shift consist of?
Remove key players. Set up a seemingly insurmountable roadblock. Reveal the terrible consequences of the main character’s previous choices.
There are many ways to go about this shift, and the scope can depend on your audience and your genre. Start by brainstorming the most interesting or mind-boggling twist you can inflict on your characters. How can you pull the rug from under them without turning your plot topsy-turvy?
Here are two tips to help you find the best stake shift.
1. Provide new vital information
Introducing new information is a great way to keep your story on track while changing up the trajectory. Shatter your character’s expectations of how their future will go. Don’t knock them out of the sky yet, but kick up the turbulence.
What makes the Star Wars example so powerful is that it doesn’t change the overall story goal. They still must stop the Empire, but it’s become more complicated morally. Will Luke follow his father to the Dark Side? Are we at risk of losing our hero’s soul? Or will anyone find redemption in the end? This creates a new, troubling dynamic that shakes the faith of the cast while gripping your reader’s attention.
The new information can also be positive, such as a new clue in a murder mystery to reenergize the investigation. If you have multiple points of view, you can cut away to the antagonist making their move to undermine the hero’s efforts. Lots of tension comes from the reader knowing something the characters don’t.
So what shocking truth can you introduce to perplex your protagonist? Enrapture your reader? In fact, what kind of truth can you reveal to the protagonist about themselves?
2. Make the protagonist self-reflect
Another way to approach the middle is to find a way to shake up the main character’s worldview. Creating an inescapable moment of reflection will ramp up your story’s momentum. Does your protagonist like what they see? Are they increasingly hopeless or hopeful about their future? and most importantly, what will they do about it?
A fully fleshed-out character typically has some hang-up that’s holding them back, whether they’re aware of it or not. After all, what gripping story doesn’t have a healthy dollop of ego death? and if the midpoint doesn’t shake that up, we at least need to see the scales start to fall from the main character’s eyes. They may not be fully prepared to wrestle with the truth but their time is coming.
If your characters weren’t taking their problems seriously before, they desperately need to now. Everything after the midpoint should lead to your finale. Time is running out. No detour should stray too far from the plot’s throughline. Now instead of wandering, you and your characters are revitalized, rattled, ready to fight.
Don’t save the middle for last
While modern Western story structure often has the same format, the way this unfolds in each story can be different. Many milestones of change will hold up your story like tent poles. Allow your middle to hold up the heart of your story. Heighten the emotions, either with hope or fear.
But don’t change the scope of your story so much that it’s unrecognizable. It’s possible that a carefully planned twist can backfire on you, so foreshadow it enough that your readers can follow along, or not feel too disbelieving.
The sooner you pinpoint all the major moments of change in your story, the tighter your plot will become. The clearer your structure, the more powerful your writing.
Kristin Melville is a book coach and fiction writer based in the San Francisco, Bay Area. Along with writing craft articles on The Self-Pub Action Club, she works with fantasy authors looking to self-publish and break through their writer’s block. For more about Kristin and her work, visit kristinmelville.com.
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