Hello again aspiring authors!

Last time, we looked at the Beginning and End of our story.  We knew how our character started and how the character ended up.  Hopefully with some characterization and change along the way.

Before we dive into the next part, I just wanted to take a minute and say that a lot of this planning has come from the things I’ve read and things I’ve done to set up my nano novels.  Feel free to take some or all of the advice if you find it helpful.  If not, ignore it and thanks for reading.  I hope this will help you in some way.

While I’ve read a few books on plotting and planning, one of the books I really liked was Save The Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need by Blake Snyder.  While the book gets panned by many, and I can see how, I think it provides lots of tips for setting up the story.  There are beats in a story that occur around the same spots.  Those are the spots we are hitting currently.

Midpoint

Just like I did last time, I create folder in Scrivener 3.  For now, I’ll call it midpoint, but I’ll probably call it something else.

What usually happens at the midpoints of all good stories?

For most Hero’s Journey the character becomes over confident.

This is the halfway point of your novel, so things should be really clipping along at a good pace at this point, but really the midpoint really needs to start your character down a spiral.  You character should be headed towards their lowest point possible.

If you’re writing an action novel, this is were the hero might fight the bad guy for the first time and they lose so bad.

Romance?  You two love interests just got into a fight because of their flaws that you set up early.  Or they can’t see how they could possibly make things work between them at this point.

Mystery – Your character might have run out of clues, or has been caught up in something they really didn’t want to.

For Leddy, I’m thinking that she’s going to be going down a spiral of drugs and losing her son (not with death, but with running away).  It is going to cause her to have to examine just what she’s going to have to do to get out of her own way.

Break into Act 3

As you head towards the beginning of Act 3, you characters need to overcome or figure out what is holding them back and have headed off to fix things.

I want to be really clear here:  YOU CHARACTER needs to do this.

Don’t have things happen to your character and have them react.  There’s no emotional resonance with chance.  If a character chooses to make something happen though, it makes the story work.  It makes the audience cheer for them.  It makes them turn the page to see what happens next.

If you had your character lose earlier, they need to get the confidence to go try again, this time win.

If your lovers where at war with themselves, this is where one of them figures out that they belong together and makes a plan to make things better.

Your detective has started to figure out what has happened in the mystery and has to test the main bad guy here.

Even if you’re not writing action here, make your character active towards their fate.

Wrap up

Think about the best stories you know, what happens at the midpoint of the story, and when do things start to turn around for them?  Try it out next time you read a book or watch a movie.

You might think that this is very formulaic, and honestly it is, but it’s how great stories are told.  If you can subvert what normally happens here, please do it and try.  But what people are really looking for characters that the love and how they handle the things that authors throw at them.

As always make sure you’re following the site on Twitter and Facebook.  There’s also a Facebook Group that I’m hoping to get going as well.

You can also sign up for our mailing list and get the weekly update sent directly to your e-mail so that you don’t miss any of the important things happening during the week.

[mc4wp_form id=”806″]