books

Suffering from mid-book sag? Is your story slumped in a sofa hole, not going anywhere? Don’t worry, rescue is at hand. Welcome to the mysterious midpoint and the miracles it will work for your book.

First things first, where does the midpoint fall? Right in the middle of your book, that’s where! So, if you’re planning to write a novel or memoir of 80 000 words then around the 40 000 word mark (adjust the maths to suit). To discover the midpoints of your favourite novels, flick the book open to halfway and you’ll see the midpoint unfolding.

Your midpoint is the tentpole which will hold up the centre of your story. Midpoints change things up, and most importantly make things worse. Much worse.

Think back to your inciting incident or call to adventure, the external event that forces your character to take up the quest or challenge of the story. The inciting incident falls within the first quarter of your book and starts the story action properly. Before then your character is quite happily (or unhappily) plodding along in their everyday world, until BAM, the inciting incident sets them off on a course of action which they have no choice but to pursue.

Once we’re into the body of the story, most of the plot points are based around actions that the protagonist decides upon and takes. They make plans, sometimes sensible, sometimes not, and carry out those plans. Unfortunately for them, they’re book characters, so mostly these actions only make things worse.

Then we hit the MIDPOINT. Like the inciting incident, this is another external event – the character does not choose this event, in fact they’d have run a mile if they’d seen it coming.

EXAMPLES

In Gone with the Wind, Scarlett has escaped the war in Atlanta and faced all sorts of dangers to make her way back to the family mansion. She arrives only to find it stripped by the Yankees, broken down and bereft. Not only is her home destroyed and the peace and plenty she’s hoped to shelter in gone, but her beloved mother has died. All the good and beauty has gone from her world, and she can no longer be the pampered princess she once was. She is being forced to change.

Sometimes the midpoint is where we realise that everything we thought was true has changed. The plot is flipped on its head and suddenly we’re in much deeper water than we thought.

In Titanic, for example, we’ve had plenty of tension and conflict with our star-crossed lovers from the start, but what happens at the midpoint? Can you guess? Suddenly we go from a troubled cross-classes love story to a story of survival when The Titanic hits the iceberg. We are in deep, cold water, literally.

In Gravity, the astronaut who’s been sent spinning into space after an asteroid shower finally reaches the ship, only to find it is out of fuel. In Fatal Attraction, Glenn Close tells (the happily married to someone else) Michael Douglas, she’s pregnant and is keeping the baby.

Look for midpoint examples in the books you’re reading. In Thrill Seekers, the boys mucking about and drug taking suddenly gets serious when one of them is killed. In Hard As, Bryan is transferred to a youth detention centre after voicing concerns about girls at the orphanage being molested. In Pride and Prejudice, Lizzie’s youngest sister runs off with the despicable Wickham and the whole family is thrown into disrepute and turmoil.

The protagonists don’t choose for these things to happen to them, but they do and suddenly all their old ways of acting are redundant. The enemy is much worse and much stronger than they thought. The protagonist is going to have to change and make new and better decisions. This is perhaps the point where one of their strengths proves to be a weakness or a weakness becomes a strength. Things are turned around.

If you are writing a novel, imagine some external event, perhaps exacerbated or in some way triggered by the actions of your protagonist, that you can insert that will ramp up the tension and put your character under pressure. For example: Let’s say you’re writing about a troubled detective who has to solve a crime before another murder is committed. They have imprisoned who they thought was the killer, but while that person is in jail, another similar murder takes place.

If you’re writing a memoir, have a look at your key Heart Clutching Moments and see if you can find an external event that threw a big spanner in the works, or something that turned your life upside down and made the problem even worse. For example: Let’s say the memoir is about a woman searching for a child she’s given up for adoption. She’s been following all the clues, and finally tracks down her son, only to discover he’s dying.

Keep an eye out for midpoint moments in every book you read and every film you watch. It’s always right in the middle and even though the action may be small, like the young men kissing in Moonlight, it makes everything much worse and forces change and action.

Prop up that sagging centre of your project with a miraculous midpoint that will bring a whole new boost of energy to your book!

What’s your favourite midpoint moment? Need help talking through possible midpoints for your project? Just leave a comment!

Keep going! Let the midpoint escalate your book. Go crazy and have fun! Writing is a crazy business, we may as well have fun playing with characters while we’re at it!

Lots of love

Edwina xx

PS. These images have been generated with AI. Kind of fun to play with too 🙂

You’ve started your story with a bang, like you’re supposed to. You’ve got a great hook, a killer first scene and everything is coming up roses, but then you start explaining. And explaining. Filling the reader in on every little detail they need to know about your protagonist, right from when and where they were born and their parents troubled histories, and their schooling and how they were bullied as kids and were jealous of their sisters and then started work, but that first job just wasn’t a right fit and… Twenty pages later, your story comes back to your exciting hook. But your reader has already left the building.

What you’ve just done is an INFO DUMP! So easy to fall into, trickier to get out of.

Info dumps come in many forms, and most writers have done one, at least once! They’re a first draft hazard, when we’re still figuring out who our characters are. But don’t worry, they can be fixed.

BACKSTORY DUMPS

The first type of info dump that most writers fall into is the kind described above, a whole lot of information about the character, their formative years and family. This is important to know, as the writer. Not so much for the reader who’ll pick up key points about this background as they read the story that hooked them. Writers need to have a thorough knowledge of their characters, so we write about them and really get to know every detail in our first drafts. Info dumps also happen a lot in memoir, where perhaps the background information is more relevant. However, if you drop everything into one big pile, especially at the start of a story, the reader will turn away.

You’ve grabbed them with the hook, and they want to keep reading that story, not some long-winded explanation of why the character is the way they are.

REMEDY

Photo by Chokniti Khongchum on Pexels.com

All your work has not been wasted. Use that information to drip feed to your readers on a “need to know” basis. Keep secrets about the past and reveal them in phrases or sentences around key plot points in the story that hooked your readers in the first place. You need to know everything because that will help you shape your characters’ actions, but let the reader infer most of the backstory, dropping in snippets where relevant or important.

And keep that big traumatic secret for as long as you can, ready to reveal when your character is at their lowest point.

RESEARCH DUMPS

This dump occurs a lot in historical fiction or in memoirs where the author has gone down the rabbit hole of family history research right back to the 1600s! Now, it’s wonderful to have all this new knowledge, but when you dump it all on the reader in one big whammy, they’ll feel like they’re reading a textbook, not a narrative. So, even though you’re now the expert on a certain rare bee for example, don’t inflict the reader with page after page of everything you’ve learnt, no matter how interesting.

You’ve captured their attention with your great story hook, don’t let that fish wriggle off the line by expecting them to be as interested as you are in your pet research topic.

REMEDY

Your job now is to seamlessly interweave the most vital and relevant information through your plot, setting and characters, to make it seem as if the research isn’t even there, but that the world you’ve created is real and accurate. Your research must be revealed through characters, settings and plot points that demonstrate the knowledge you’ve gained. Not in one big ugly dump, but in every specific detail you share about the time and place, and through the way characters act and interact.

DIALOGUE INFO DUMPS

Take either of the dump categories above and insert all the information into someone’s very long section of dialogue and you have a Dialogue Dump. Don’t do it. Ever. Or your reader will end up looking like the poor fellow in the photo!

Dialogue is a stylised form of expression more akin to poetry than actual conversation. It is always best kept brief, except of course for the occasional monologue, but don’t let even them run on too long.

REMEDY

Remove all dumps from dialogue and find another way to include only the most important information. If you need to have your characters explain their pasts for the sake of the plot, then give them a potent line or two but paraphrase the rest and cut back as much as you can while retaining meaning. If you’ve dumped a whole lot of plot information into a character’s speech, cut right back and reveal anything extra in another way.

Photo by Mia Stein on Pexels.com BEWARE THE INFO DUMP DRAGON!

So beware the info dump! By all means, let yourself go in your first draft and write as much as you like about every character’s past or the specialness of that bee, or the shoes they wore in 16^th century Spain, just don’t let it slide into your second draft without serious consideration of how, where and why you insert it. If you’ve included over a paragraph or two of backstory or research details, you’ve gone too far. Cut back. Sometimes all you need is a phrase or a sentence or two.

I hope that helps you slay your Info Dump Dragons and write the very best book you can. Do let me know if you found this useful!

Write like the wind!

Lots of love,

Edwina xx