Lesson 6: Writing the Middle.
This lesson is about getting the middle of your book right. The specific focus is reading scheme, a very interesting challenge.
Challenges, Choices and Chances.
Challenges, Choices and Chances Continued.
What if You've Lost the Plot?
Dialogue and Style.
Specific level - Reading Scheme.
Supplement. Anatomy of a Specific RS Novel.
W.I.P. Section. Writing the Middle.
Exercises and Bibliography
Challenges, Choices and Chances.
As you write the middle of a book, you need to keep the flow going in three different streams. Perhaps you remember the analogy of the person driving a team of horses that I used to demonstrate the challenges in handling multi-stranded plots? We can do worse than to use the same analogy now for controlling the elements of the narrative.
The first stream is the plot. The story events are presented as scenes, linked by scene breaks (spaces, with or without *** symbols) or by transitions. The events need to keep on coming, and they need to build on one another. Plots often work like chain reactions, with one event triggering the next.
Leave aside (for now) the small and less important events and concentrate on the major ones. Each of these will present a new or enhanced challenge to the protagonist(s), and/or offer a possible change of direction. The characters may be carried along by events and have no choice but to ride the waves, but they might also be offered chances to turn back, turn aside, or go on.
As the book progresses, these choices, chances and challenges should become bigger and more important. Compare Jed’s and Karen’s challenges at the beginning of “Alien Dawn” with what hits them in the middle of the book. Compare the challenges Tell and Gerhardt face at the beginning of “Trinity Street” (suspicion over a friend’s new companion and the logistics of completing a well-rehearsed task) with those that wait for them later.
If in doubt about the strength of a choice, chance or challenge for your characters, always ask yourself if their actions/reactions matter. Ask what they stand to lose if they fail or make the wrong choice, and what they might gain if they take a chance/challenge or make the right choice. Ask yourself, also, what will happen if they try and fail. Will they be better or worse off than if they’d not tried?
It is difficult to generalise about how slight a challenge is too slight, because children’s books differ enormously in tone. In JCBs, challenges are seldom of the life-or-death variety.
In “The Orange Outlaw”, for example, Dink, Josh and Ruth Rose face the challenge of finding out who stole the Monet painting. This sounds like an important challenge, because a Monet painting is valuable, but what do the children risk? Not a lot. If they don’t solve the mystery, the owner will have to claim on his insurance. Uncle Warren will feel bad since the painting was in his care, but he won’t be blamed for the theft. Dink will feel bad for Uncle Warren, but apart from that, the children risk only the disappointment of not solving the mystery.
This does matter quite enough for a JCB, but challenges in SCBs and YA novels are likely to be stronger, and should always impinge on the protagonists.
In “Alien Dawn” Jed and Karen try to keep a secret, but the alien’s arrival seems to threaten them and their families. Lazlo’s friend is smashed up with his bike, and the men in coats are decidedly sinister. The protagonists must make choices, and at times it seems that every choice involves serious risk to someone.
In “Alien Dawn” the problems are like rings of ripples from a stone dropped in a pool. The issues threaten more and more people as characters get involved.
In “Trinity Street”, the risks of making bad choices are extreme. Bad choices offer death, and ruin, as does doing nothing. Trusting the wrong person is lethal, and there is no choice that will return the three protagonists to their SitNor state as it was at the beginning of the book. One set of apparent futures is gone, and in the end the only possible choice is a leap of faith. As with “Alien Dawn” the fallout will hurt other people who didn’t ask to get involved.
