By: S. Jae-Jones
A couple of
months ago, I wrote a post about Inciting
Incidents that seemed to be helpful for a lot of our readers at
PubCrawl, and I’ve had a few requests to continue dissecting story beats. So
I’ve decided to tackle the next one on my list: The Midpoint.
I am sort of making up my
own story beats here, loosely cobbled together from Blake Snyder’s Save
the Cat, K.M. Weiland’s website Helping Writers Become
Authors, and our own PubCrawl alumna Janice Hardy’s Fiction University. I myself don’t
actually adhere to story beats all that strictly when I’m drafting;
I figure the beats out when I
revise.
I know a lot of writers struggle
with middles, but I’m actually not one of them. For me, the middle of the novel
is simply an extension of the beginning,
and in fact, I tend to think of my books more or less in halves: the
beginning, and then the end. The point that delineates the beginning from the
end is the midpoint.
First of all, let me say: there
is no wrong way to write a novel. Write however works best for you. For me,
my stories tend to naturally structure themselves into four acts, with three
inflection points: Revelation (end of Act I), Realization (end
of Act II), and Resolution (end of Act III).
The Realization (end of Act II) generally tends to be my Midpoint.
So what is the
Midpoint, exactly? Why is it given such emphasis in all these story
structure/plot books? I mean, a middle is just the boring bridge between the
opening and the ending, right?
. . .
To read the rest
of the post, click here:
~*~
If you missed my latest writing and
marketing tweets, here they are again:
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