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Breaking Point, Back Story, Resolution: A Three-Part Structure for Memoir

Photo by Dennis Anderson on Unsplash

Today’s post is by writer, editor, and book coach Jennifer Landau.

According to writer Jessica Ciencin Henriquez, many effective personal essays follow a three-part structure: breaking point, back story, resolution. This format works well for memoir, too. When writing your memoir, you begin at the point when something in your life has shifted and can no longer be ignored. You fill in the backstory—which is not your entire life story—that illuminates the breaking point. Then, you move your reader toward some form of resolution that offers closure, if not always catharsis.

Beginning at the breaking point

Salman Rushdie’s National Book Award-nominated memoir Knife opens with a literal breaking point: The author is stabbed multiple times by an assailant while giving a speech at an outdoor amphitheater about, of all things, how to keep writers safe. Rushdie is nearly killed. Among his injuries: a broken jaw.

At the start of Maggie Smith’s memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful she is searching through her husband’s briefcase after he returns from a business trip. She finds a postcard addressed to a woman who lives in the town he just returned from. He tells the addressee that he doesn’t know the type of pinecone they picked up on their walk, a pinecone he then brought home to the young son he shares with Smith.

Sloane Crosley begins her memoir Grief Is for People with a one-two punch. Her apartment is burglarized when she is out running errands and, she tells us, exactly a month later her former boss and best friend Russell will commit suicide.

Starting a memoir at the breaking point immediately draws in the reader. In these three examples, many questions spring to mind. Was the attack on Rushdie related to the fatwa that the Ayatollah Khomeini had issued when Rushdie published The Satanic Verses thirty plus years ago? And why was there no security at the amphitheater? What made Smith decide to root through her husband’s briefcase that night? Did they have a fight before he left? Was there previous infidelity? Was Crosley singled out for a burglary or was it just a conveniently open window? And what led to her best friend’s suicide?

We read on, looking for answers.

When considering the breaking point in your own memoir, think back to what led you to write your story in the first place. That’s likely fertile ground. The events don’t have to be as dramatic as an assassination attempt or suicide, of course. But something has to happen that makes the reader wonder what led to this inflection point.

Keeping your backstory on track

Rushdie’s and Crosley’s books are slim volumes, just over and under two hundred pages, respectively. Smith’s memoir comes in at more than 300 pages, but many of those have a single paragraph or even a single line on them. All three write with surgical precision and use backstory solely as a way to serve the forward momentum of their memoirs.

In Knife Rushdie takes us back to the night before the stabbing to show us what he calls “his last innocent evening.” He takes us back to his younger years, too. There is mention of the fatwa for context, but he doesn’t linger there. We get a portrait of his drunk and abusive father, but only to show the reader that this chaotic relationship made it difficult for Rushdie to find stability in his personal life. That is until he meets his fifth wife, Eliza, who will play a major part in Rushdie’s grueling rehab. He is showing us their courtship and the life they built together to show the reader how hard he’s worked to find a sustaining love. And all that he has to lose should he not recover.

Smith uses backstory to show the cracks in the foundation of her home. Her husband­, a one-time playwright, is jealous of Smith’s success, especially after the poem that gives her memoir its title goes viral. When Smith calls home from a work-related trip she feels her husband’s anger at her taking time away from her duties as a wife and mother. As she puts it, “I didn’t feel missed as a person. I felt missed as staff.”

Smith is also clear about the details she won’t share. She does not recount the scene of her and her husband telling their children about the divorce, for example. Here she is able to set boundaries for the memoir, while also drawing the reader close. The moment her children find out, she says, “isn’t for you.” We are outside of her story, but also her confidantes.

Crosley gives us a brief description of the ring and amulet that were stolen and an only slightly longer one of the grandmother who passed them down: “abusive and creative about it.” The jewels matter because they are Crosley’s mother’s sole inheritance and because Crosley connects their loss to her friend Russell’s suicide. She fantasizes, even after he’s dead, that he will be the one to recover them.

Crosley goes on to paint a portrait of Russell as a charismatic, but troubled man. He had problems with his partner, with his conduct as a publicist at a major publishing house, with a wider literary scandal, and with a penchant for collecting that turns to hoarding­­. On the last night Crosley sees Russell alive, he recounts a fight with his partner who told him, “Whatever happens don’t kill yourself.” Unsurprisingly, that conversation haunts the author: “My friend was telling me something and I didn’t listen. For how long had he been telling me?”

When building your backstory, think of the clearest path to the breaking point. You don’t have to be spare, but you don’t want your readers to feel like they’re following you down a series of dead ends. Too many sidetracks and they may lose trust in you as a guiding hand. If you are using the beat sheets method from Save the Cat, you can think of the breaking point as an “all is lost” beat and build out from there.

Reaching for a resolution

Resolutions in memoir are by their very nature artificial because, except in the case of posthumous works, life continues. As Smith moves through the messy dismantling of her marriage, she acknowledges that her healing is a work in progress. She hopes that by the time her memoir is published she will be in “a place of forgiveness.”

Crosley seeks resolution by traveling to Australia to jump off a cliff, a feat she failed to complete a decade earlier. She stops herself at the edge of the cliff each time, a move known as suicide drills. Here she reveals her actual motive for returning: to see something of what her friend Russell saw as he “peered into an abyss.” She takes out half a gold chain, all that remained after the burglary, and throws it over the edge of the cliff. This is where Russell is, she decides, even if she never goes back again. Months later, she finds the other half of the chain behind a bookcase in her apartment. But Russell’s half is still at the bottom of the ocean. Their separation continues.

Rushdie has the tidiest ending. He literally returns to the scene of the crime thirteen months after the attack. He stands outside the jail where his assailant is being held and then goes back to the amphitheater to recreate the scene for his wife. He makes peace with the attack and with his life. “We’re done here,” he tells Eliza. “Let’s go home.”

However you choose to resolve your memoir, make sure that it feels true to the story you’ve been telling rather than tacked on. Readers crave closure, not manipulation. Be clear about where you’ve planted yourself at the end of your memoir’s journey. Are you still in the thick of it? If so, be upfront about that. It’s a tricky stance, but workable, and can make your memoir feel alive on the page. If you’re ten years past the events of the memoir, you’ll likely have more perspective. Just guard against tying everything up in a pretty bow. Even the most joyous endings have echoes of what came before. Find this balance and you’ll be sure to leave your readers satisfied.

Why the Best Life Lessons Are Writing Lessons, Too

Today’s post is by author and editor-at-large of Writer’s Digest, Jessica Strawser.

In big, defining phases of our lives, there are always little moments that stand out. The ones you can still vividly picture years later, when everything else about that time has blurred together. As writers, we recognize these as telling details—and it’s worth considering why they’re the ones with staying power.

Chances are, there’s a good reason.

For a lot of us, the spring of 2020 is the ultimate blurry memory, a tangle of the most worrisome emotions: fear, uncertainty, grief, confusion.

But the April morning that stands out to me wasn’t tangled at all. It was so simple, in fact, someone else might have laughed it off.

While the initial lockdown looked different for everybody, for me it involved homeschooling a kindergartener and second grader who found me a poor substitute for their teachers and friends. For the record, I found myself a poor substitute, too. Like most people, I tried to keep perspective that as long as we were healthy, we could roll with anything else. But suffice to say disappointment mitigation had become a paramount parenting skill.

When my kids’ spring break approached, I braced myself. Our cancelled vacation was the least of anyone’s worries, but tell that to two Lego-crazy kids who were supposed to be jetting off to Legoland. They’d been counting down for months, chattering excitedly about which mini-figures to bring and what the best rides would be. These were the days you couldn’t even cancel a reservation because all the call centers were jammed; you just assumed it wasn’t happening and hoped your account would be credited eventually.

On the day we’d been meant to leave, I went all-out with a homemade breakfast, trying to lift their spirits. The empty week stretched ahead of us without the pseudo-normalcy of virtual school. “Well, kiddos,” I began, taking my seat at the table, “I know we’re supposed to be on a flight to California…”

My 5-year-old cut in with pure exuberance: “And instead, we’re eating waffles!”

She said this with not a trace of wistful longing. Only a minute-to-minute comparison that a decadent breakfast at home was way better than being on a cross-country flight, uncomfortably buckled into a tin can in the sky.

It stopped me in my tracks. At a time when all the adults were encouraging each other to find joy, to stay present and hold our people close … well, she wasn’t telling herself anything. She was just doing it.

She was showing us how.

I shared this story with many friends who found it sweet, but interestingly, only my writer friends seemed as profoundly moved as I was. Moved to tears. Moved enough to make it a mantra. A group of us had an ongoing email thread full of angst about how on earth we’d meet our deadlines, and whether it even mattered. My daughter’s remark became our shorthand for the small triumphs, and for gratitude—that the sun came out at last, or the grocery shelves were stocked again, or we got a call from an old friend. If we actually liked what we wrote that day, even better.

Today, I ate the waffles, we’d write, the relief palpable. It evolved into a way of encouraging each other, too, to hold out a hand when someone seemed overwhelmed: One day at a time. Just make yourself some waffles, girl. You sound hungry.

Bookshop • Amazon

Years later, I still think about it. It even worked its way into my latest novel. In Catch You Later, new this fall, the two main characters are lifelong best friends, women stuck in dead-end jobs at an isolated highway travel stop. One of them is content to make the best of things there; the other is desperate to get out. When her exit plan suffers a huge setback, they have a literal waffles moment that becomes their own shorthand, the way it did for us.

One of the novelists from that original thread was among the first to read my advance copies. She texted me instantly upon reaching that scene. Love that you put in the waffles!

Maybe we found it useful to have a mantra to ground us because we’re word people. But I wonder if it was more than that.

I wonder if all the best life lessons are writing lessons too. Or if writers are just more inclined to keep our eyes open for metaphors and hidden meaning, to see things from a different point of view.

Or maybe there’s something about this particular lesson that resonates more. Once writers enter the publishing realm, there’s inevitably a low-grade tension in much of what we do. We work and create and dream and strive in an industry that’s in a perpetual state of flux, stress, and even fear (AI, anyone?).

There are times where all we can do—where the best thing to do—is sit down at the table and focus on what’s in front of us. Blocking it all out for a moment of uncomplicated bliss with those glorious, fluffy squares.

When you’re harnessing the flow of a new draft, setting aside any worry of whether it will ever be good enough to publish.

When you’re smarting from the sting of rejection and pat yourself on the back anyway, for being brave enough to put the work out there, for being willing to try again.

When you’ve had a long day at the office and turn down a happy hour with your coworkers, because you promised yourself that tonight, you’d prioritize your writing.

When you celebrate every milestone, even the little ones. When you allow yourself to be buoyed by your glowing reviews on Goodreads and ignore the negatives.

When you finally stand at the podium of your own book launch, taking questions from the audience, and they already want to know what’s next and how fast it’s going to happen.

It’s okay—even good—to shut it all out sometimes. To savor the moment you’re in—the one you’ve worked hard to create for yourself. The one no one can take away from you.

Eat those waffles, my fellow writers.

I don’t know whether it’s the secret to being more successful. But it might just make us all a whole lot happier.

Don’t Demonize Print on Demand

Over at LitHub—the established water cooler for the literary/MFA publishing crowd—bookseller Drew Broussard wrote a piece last week, Have You Purchased a Weirdly Low-Quality Paperback Book Lately? This May Be Why.

The crux of his piece is that traditional publishers—the big ones in particular—are using print-on-demand to fulfill orders to deliver a crappy, overpriced product. As a bookseller, Broussard is disturbed by this, as it undercuts the quality he wants to represent, plus it can end up costing readers more at the register. Some publishers raise the price of paperbacks when moving to POD because it costs more per unit to print, even if the quality dips. That said, Broussard is not always in favor of higher production values. He notes that the rise of sprayed edges and hardcover reissues of popular novels are “morally-neutral late-capitalist cash-grabs.” (The Big Five have a very fine line to walk to be held in high regard today.)

Arguments about the role and quality of print on demand have been ongoing since the technology rose to prominence in the early 2000s.

POD started off being closely associated with the self-publishing market, as it allows authors to publish for hundreds of dollars, if not zero dollars. It has never really shaken off that association, even though it has been a godsend for authors and publishers alike. For authors, it eases the path to nationwide distribution and retail placement; both Amazon and Ingram use the technology (on their own or through printers for hire) to fulfill orders. And for bigger publishers, it has meant not losing sales when being caught short of stock, whether because of a prize win, a current event, or scheduling problems—any number of reasons, some better than others.

Broussard’s position is that POD is being used for convenience and not for really good reasons. From his perspective, I’m guessing a good reason might be fulfilling the extraordinary demand for specific titles in June 2020, after George Floyd’s murder. Titles on race filled the top 10 on the New York Times bestseller list in a way that no publisher could’ve ever anticipated. Ingram’s print-on-demand capabilities ensured that spike in demand could be met. Would it have been better to make readers wait? If so, they might have been waiting a very long time given supply chain problems during the pandemic. And I don’t think the authors of those books wanted readers to wait any more than the publishers did. Every retailer and distributor will tell you that if the book can’t be bought when the customer wants it, you’ve lost the sale.

This is perhaps why both Ingram and Amazon have been rather insistent that publishers give them permission, along with appropriate digital files, to produce titles using POD if and when stock runs out. When I worked at a midsize traditional publisher, this insistence came along with some favorable terms if certain conditions were met. These days, I have to wonder if the carrots have turned to sticks. One retired publisher commented on Threads—and I have heard the same from others—that there is pressure from a “specific retailer” (Amazon) to have the book available as POD even if stock is available. He writes, “It allows them to be never out of stock. That has driven the massive expansion of titles in the two POD programs. It also means that two customers who order a book from that retailer may get different quality goods in their delivery.”

Early POD books were noticeably low quality, but the technology has been advancing for nearly three decades now, and except for people really enmeshed in the industry, it can be impossible to distinguish a POD title from an offset title, at least for the average black-and-white paperback that’s mostly text. The “secret” often shared for identifying a POD book? Look at the last few pages for a barcode. That’s now the giveaway, rather than the paper, cover, or printing quality.

But it’s undeniably true that some POD titles just don’t look great.

For some titles, you definitely wouldn’t want to put the original, offset edition next to the POD edition as the differences would be glaring. So what’s going on? I can only speculate (and maybe some of you working at publishers or printers can enlighten me in the comments), but here are likely explanations. All of this applies to traditional publishers, especially Big Five publishers, and their normal business operations. 

The POD edition was not set up competently. This can be fixed. Publisher Anne Trubek discusses at length who’s to blame when POD looks bad, as well as the technical steps that go into printing a book. Don’t blame POD. Blame the care and competence of those setting up the POD edition.The POD printer somehow botched the job, or more likely the publisher chose lower quality materials, perhaps because better quality materials were not available. (Paper shortages are a thing, more on that in a minute.)The publisher never intended to keep the same level of production value for the book after the first edition or first print run sold out. They planned for the book to move to POD once it became a backlist book or started selling below a certain threshold of copies. The question always becomes, “Does that cover gloss [or special thing that adds cost but is only attainable from offset printing] sell more copies?” Often the answer is no.The original offset edition was never going to transition all that well to POD to begin with.

On this last point: For many years now, people who specialize in book printing and manufacturing have begged and pleaded with publishers to standardize how they produce their books (e.g., paper types, trim, finishes, and more). Standardization reduces costs for everyone in the supply chain, right down to the reader. Standardization also means that when publishers or retailers must use POD to fulfill orders, for any reason, the quality differences become less pronounced or don’t exist. You’re not changing the book trim, you’re not making big changes to the paper quality, etc. POD can do a lot of things well, but it has limited options for trims, papers or special printing operations.

Even 15 years ago, I was being pressured as an editorial director to standardize. That pressure has only been ratcheted up due to ongoing consolidation and transformation of the paper and printing industries. The cost of paper and printing keeps increasing and it’s not just an artifact of the pandemic. There’s a larger story here about the transformation of the paper and printing industry and economic forces at work that book publishing cannot control. I’ve written in my paid newsletter about this (see here, here, and here)—my husband worked for 20 years in book production, so you’re noticing some of that influence!—but it remains a rather boring topic except to a handful of insiders and specialists. But it has a dramatic effect on what Broussard is noticing and what is likely to happen in the future.

Smaller publishers rely on print on demand more than the big publishers.

It’s about money and financial risk. A print run is an investment that might not pay the publisher back in the form of sales. The money is tied up in inventory and it can incur ongoing warehousing costs. It means the publisher has less money for other things, like author advances or marketing. Even for a book that’s selling well, knowing when to go back to press and in what quantity can make the difference between a successful book and one that costs the business dearly. I do admit, however, that the aversion to inventory and warehousing can be taken too far. I saw it happen as an editor, when a focus on “just in time” inventory and reduced warehousing space could end up costing more in the end. But that’s another discussion. Suffice it to say, there’s a balance to be struck.

Authors have expressed frustration with their publishers about the lack of transparency and communication.

Usually the fact their book is being printed and fulfilled via POD is never disclosed. While I wouldn’t say the publisher is keeping it a secret exactly, in my experience, authors are rarely if ever notified about issues related to inventory, printing, or pricing changes. For my own book, my publisher certainly never told me about the move to POD or that the price had increased for that POD edition; I found out on my own. But the transition was seamless and I’ve never heard a single complaint from anyone. (Also, for traditional publishing contracts, authors can expect to be paid their usual royalty rate regardless of how the book is printed.)

It would be great if publishers could do better communicating these changes if only for the sake of transparency and increased trust, but it is highly unlikely the editors themselves—the point person for authors—are kept in the loop about such things. Once a book has sold through its first print run and is due for a reprint, not only has the editor moved on in many cases, but it’s a discussion between the production department and the people who manage inventory and reprints, maybe sales staff. So much depends on the publisher. Unfortunately, if authors are hearing about potential problems from booksellers and feeling blindsided, that’s undesirable for everyone.

Which brings me back to Broussard’s piece: His proclamations about POD on social media, by his own admission, have stoked author anxiety about publishers using POD for their books. He says authors are “shocked to see the product of their labors … given such short shrift.” While he says his criticism is really directed at big publishers in particular (they’re the late-capitalist greedy ones), I don’t see authors being educated as much as they’re being set against a method of printing that is needed by the industry and shouldn’t have a moral judgment tied to it.

The bottom line

I have no doubt that POD is getting misused in some cases and not executed well in others,  but the wiser call to action is to ask how POD can produce a better outcome when it becomes the most logical, sustainable or economical choice for a book. It can produce outstanding outcomes where everyone is satisfied, but it does require advance planning and thoughtfulness. As editor Martha Bayne recently commented, “Print on demand is a technology, pure and simple. Some (many) print on demand books are of excellent quality, indistinguishable from an offset printed book. Almost all scholarly books are printed POD these days, which allows university presses to take risks on books that may only sell 300 copies and keep them in print. Some POD books are shoddily produced, due to printer error, publisher cost-cutting, or some weird combination of the two. But POD itself is value neutral.”

Forget the First Line. Focus on First Pages.

Photo by Jean-Paul Wettstein

Today’s post is by editor Tiffany Yates Martin. Join her on Wednesday, October 30, for the online class Irresistible First Chapters.

Studies show people make judgments about others in a tenth of a second. And it often seems like readers, agents, and editors may decide almost as quickly whether to keep reading your story.

But here’s advice I wish I could offer to every writer tying themselves into knots trying to find that magical first line: Let it go. Worry less about creating a first sentence that will shock and awe, and worry more about drawing them into the story one link of the chain at a time.

The truth about first lines

First lines are greatly overrated. Yes, there have been some classics that have been immortalized in the canon, but too many authors get bogged down trying to create that perfect opening sentence and prevent themselves from creating an effective story.

And while the occasional agent or editor may say they stop reading if that first sentence doesn’t smash it, experienced industry professionals who have read hundreds if not thousands of manuscripts know that the opening line is just the first bread crumb. Effective story openings offer a steady trail of crumbs.

Even if you manage to nail a killer lead sentence, a great first line or page doesn’t make up for other deficiencies. I once was enraptured by a bestseller’s brilliant first line, but the story quickly unraveled and I had to force myself to grudge-finish, hoping it would eventually live up to that chef’s kiss of an opening line. (It didn’t.) A perfect first line isn’t going to help you appeal to industry pros or readers any more than Cinderella’s rotten stepsisters were able to fool the prince beyond their surface-level beauty.

Think of your story’s opening as weaving a spell over your reader: the magic starts working from that very first line, but it’s going to take more than that to complete the incantation.

What about first paragraphs?

These introductory lines of your story carry a lot of weight, it’s true. Their job is to give the reader some reason to want to know more. That generally means they should accomplish a number of key things:

introduce a character who interests and attracts the reader enough to want to take a journey with themcreate a question or uncertainty readers want addressedcreate some sense of tension that readers want resolvedoffer an appealing voice the reader wants to spend more time with

Your first line may be that shiny flash that first draws us closer to investigate the hook, but it’s the lines and paragraphs that follow that determine whether we bite.

“When I think of my wife, I always think of her head,” begins Nick Dunne in Gone Girl, and as he goes on in that first paragraph to clinically describe its contours and texture under which “you could imagine the skull quite easily,” right away we have a keen sense that something is very not-right here between these two characters.

One of the truest truisms of story is that readers don’t care what’s happening until they care who it’s happening to, and it’s hard to capture readers without some sense of character. We read past that intriguing first line to know more about this person … and find that Nick is just as curious about the contents of that head—meaning his wife’s mind and her thoughts, which are opaque to him despite their marriage, although he does imagine opening her head up to try to follow them.

It’s the normal relationship uncertainties he so badly wants answers to, he assures the increasingly unsettled reader. Questions that may initially make us nod in recognition—“What are you thinking? How are you feeling?”—before Flynn knocks us off of our comfortable perch again: “Who are you? What have we done to each other? What will we do?”

We don’t know, but it’s the rare reader who doesn’t want to find out at this point.

Flynn uses all four of the above techniques for hooking readers: character, tension, question, and voice, enticing us into the story further with every line of those first three paragraphs.

What about first pages?

The intrigue and interest you’ve raised in your first page make a promise to the reader: “Come on in and this story will give you what you want and more.” They promise that these elements and events are meaningful and relevant and will tie together over the course of the story—a promise you must begin to deliver on immediately in the first pages.

The first line of V. E. Schwab’s bestselling book The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue isn’t exactly a world shaker: “The girl wakes up in someone else’s bed.”

It’s intriguing enough to tickle our attention, perhaps, but not a situation that many readers haven’t found themselves in before (it’s okay to admit it).

Neither is the next line, as she lies in crystalline stillness “to hold time like a breath in her chest” in the moments before he wakes, to “keep the memory of their night alive through sheer force of will.” Anyone who’s ever feared that the cold morning light might dissipate the magic of a previous evening might not raise an eyebrow at that either—but the story’s lyrical voice begins to draw the reader closer.

Then come the questions and uncertainties:

He’ll forget, she understands: “They always do.” Now we’re seeing a pattern of behavior that may pique our curiosity: How often does she do this? What is the situation? Who are “they”?And the next paragraph of absolution: “It is never their faults.” Why not? Whose is it?The next, where she observes his body with “details long memorized,” upending readers’ assumptions: if these two are familiar enough for “long memorization” of each other’s bodies, who are the others she refers to—and what exactly is going on?

The rest of the first page reveals she met him the previous night; lied about her name “but only because she can’t say her real name”; that she’s taken on several other names in the last month, and two nights ago chose her current one when she was with this same man under another identity.

With every line of the rest of the chapter Schwab offers more detail, fills in a bit more of the picture one brushstroke at a time. Readers are given context that begins to answer some of our initial questions, even as the author introduces more intriguing uncertainties and questions and contradictions that keep us reading to discover more answers.

We’re not just interested in the resolution of ambiguous questions in general. We’re curious about her, trying to put together pieces of this puzzle about this unusual woman, her situation, what she is doing and why.

First-pages faux pasToo much vagueness: Uncertainty and questions in a reader’s mind are solid devices for snagging their interest—but you must offer enough detail to plant our feet and give us some idea why it matters. Vague, amorphous questions do nothing but frustrate readers; we don’t have enough context to care about the answers. Balance offering enough of the picture to orient readers to the situation and the character while holding back a key puzzle piece or two.Action or conflict without character: Leaping straight into exciting action or conflict seems like a powerful way to start your story with a bang and grab readers’ attention. But if we don’t know enough yet about the players involved, or why this incident is happening or matters to them, then it’s just “stuff” happening, removed from the context that makes readers invest. A car being run off the road on a deserted highway late at night by the lone truck behind them might seem like a high-stakes, high-intensity opening sure to ensnare readers, but until we have some context about who it’s happening to (or who is causing it) and why, it’s like watching a video game without real-life impact or consequences.Character info dump: Don’t overdo it. Readers don’t need the full CV of your character(s) in the opening scene; we just need some reason to want to know more. You can paint in more context little by little as the story moves forward. Think about when you meet someone new: Most of us don’t immediately grill them about their background, lives, or personalities; we begin to figure out who they are as we see what they do, how they act, what they say. But we only begin to engage if something about them intrigues us enough to know more.Unclear perspective: The narrative voice is the reader’s companion and guide throughout the story—whether that of a discrete “narrator” or the main character(s) themselves. If we don’t have some idea what perspective we’re joining the story from, readers will be uncertain of their footing in the story. If the story’s narrative voice is weak or absent or dull, readers may not want to commit to spending hundreds of pages with it—or trust the storyteller.

While a unique, lyrical, or appealing voice may snag readers’ interest on its own for a few lines, remember that what you say with your story is more compelling to readers than how you say it. A story’s voice should grow out of and serve the story. The most perfect prose in the world won’t compensate for a story that doesn’t set a hook that makes readers want to read on.

Note from Jane: Join us on Wednesday, October 30, for the online class Irresistible First Chapters.

Why Everyone Should Keep an Authority List

Today’s post is by book coach, editor, and author Joshua Doležal.

I’m just Josh. What does an average guy like me have to say? If you ever find yourself thinking that way, you should try an authority list.

1. Everyone is an authority on something

Most of us believe, when we push our carts past strangers in the grocery store, that each of them has a wealth of knowledge from their life experience. That older gentleman with the baggy jeans and suspenders looks like a great handyman. Maybe he is a veteran with firsthand memories of Vietnam. That college student in sweatpants at the self-checkout register—maybe they have 30,000 fans on a gaming platform, maybe they are already a whiz at ecommerce.

Our default assumption about others is that they know valuable things that we don’t. So why is it so hard to believe the same about ourselves?

You don’t have to be a leading expert on thoracic medicine to write a gripping memoir. Sure, the trendy topics these days are things like trauma, addiction, and gender ambiguity. But some of my favorite books are about simpler things, or subjects that might not seem glamorous.

David Mas Masumoto’s Epitaph for a Peach draws from years of farming experience, but really it’s a book about preserving family traditions, adapting to change, and facing uncertainty. In fact, it’s Masumoto’s lack of confidence in farming that’s compelling. Novella Carpenter’s Farm City is also propelled as much by her ignorance and the pickles she gets into as an urban farmer as it is about clear agricultural takeaways.

Time and again I find myself advising writers to lean into the mess. So that might be one place to start if you don’t feel like you have anything authoritative to say. What are the sources of your self-doubt? What story might you tell if you stopped trying to present yourself as a sage handing down wisdom from on high, but instead wrote bravely into the messes that you know so well?

2. Lists unlock ideas

Memory is a network of interlocking experiences. Trigger one memory, and it will awaken others. The story-worthy idea might be the last one in your list. But you might never have unlocked it if you hadn’t flipped every other trigger first.

So just start listing things that you could teach a reader something about or that you feel you know well. Here’s what a short list might look like for me.

ParentingSongwritingBaseballGardeningTeachingWildland firefightingWilderness conservationFitness

The more you add to your list, the more you’ll remember. Pretty soon you’ll agree with Flannery O’Connor that any of us who survives childhood has enough material to write for the rest of our lives.

3. Lists lead to scenes

Many of my brainstorming tools are sneaky ways to start thinking about scenes. The authority list works best when we keep breaking each topic down to single places and times. It’s like playing with Google Maps, where you call up the aerial view of your town and keep zooming in until you reach the street view.

So let’s say that I’m an authority on wildland firefighting. That job requires a hundred different tasks.

Initial attack (small crews)Deployments (large crews)Chainsaw work (cutting fuel breaks, dropping hazardous snags)Hoselays (trunk lines, fittings, laterals)Back burns (drip torches, pyrotechnics)Mop-up (day shift, night shift, Pulaskis and shovels and McLeod tools)

None of that jargon means anything to you yet. But nested within each of those tasks are scenes, moments in time, little videos playing in my memory.

Initial attack. Getting helicoptered out to a lightning strike with my buddy Tori, who disappeared from my life after that summer except on Facebook. It is a remarkable thing to spend two nights on a mountain with another human being with just a sleeping bag and a few MREs (Meals Ready To Eat) that feel like they are left over from the Vietnam War. Why was this kind of intimacy so easy to find in college? Why is it so hard to find in mid-life?

Deployments. I was dispatched with large crews to California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, even northern Alberta (see “Mutiny in the North Woods”). I could write a whole essay on the strange phenomenon of the fireline romance, how all of the rules of conventional life seemed thrown out the window in fire camps. I saw unlikely pairings on every deployment and enjoyed one myself. It couldn’t have been that we felt a lack of accountability, because we were living cheek to jowl in tent camps with people we knew from our small towns. Was it that drawing close to a primeval force like wildfire, even the smoldering remnants of it that we scraped away at on night shift, awakened the kind of survival instinct that supposedly sparks a baby boom after natural disasters? The fireline romance afflicted (or enriched) firefighters of all ages: why?

Maybe it’s unfair of me to fall back on such dramatic memories. So let’s take a crack at songwriting. I cut a demo years ago, performed at coffee houses, restaurants, and cafes through graduate school, and thought I might aspire to more. But I’m happy enough as a campfire guitarist now.

Just like firefighting, I could break songwriting into tasks or more thematic memories.

Love interestsCollege music scene in rural TennesseeChords and melody first, or the lyrics?Imitation and originality

Love interests. I wrote my first song for Maya, a girl I thought I loved, but now realize I never knew. It was the only time in my life I’ve ever been that possessed by a crush. Maya was a little puzzled by the whole thing, I imagine, and nothing came of it. But that experience unlocked something in my creative life. I wrote 80 songs during college, probably over a hundred by now, counting the dance ditties for my kids. During that time, I’ve pondered a perhaps unanswerable question: why did I write my best songs for women I didn’t really love? Does this say something about me—that my love songs are all avoidance fantasies—or about songwriting in general? Does the creative spark spring from something more like lust than like love?

Imitation and originality. It is a strange thing how certain chord schemes get baked into muscle memory. Even now while doodling around I find myself drifting into the depressive major/minor progression that I must have absorbed from Joan Osborne’s “One of Us,” or from R.E.M., or maybe Shawn Colvin. I can recognize the warmth that runs through U2’s oeuvre, how those melodies always launch up at the end rather than plunging down to the minor chord. But that’s not how my songs ever want to come out. Is it because I grew up in the 90s, a child of Alice in Chains and Soundgarden, and I cannot now escape that imprint on my sense memories? But I hear a similar melancholy in folk tunes, all those murder ballads, even the supposedly happy “Shady Grove,” which I performed at my wedding. So maybe what wants to come out in my songs is more a fundamental human truth than an echo of all my influences. When you get right down to it, where do songs come from?

The question is the key

The two ingredients necessary to push an essay or a book forward are scenes, which we locate by zooming in to places and times, and questions, the messes we find ourselves in or the memories we struggle to comprehend.

As you make your list, keep one eye open for the questions that emerge from it. You’re not generating a list of topics to then “write about.” You’re generating a list of containers for memories to write through. If you’re not curious about anything that shows up in your list, if you don’t feel some urgency to wrangle beauty and order out of the mess, then the result will be either flat or incomplete.

Masumoto fears that shifting consumer demands mean the death of his heirloom peaches. People don’t care about flavor anymore, they just want shelf life and color. So he prepares to say goodbye to his beloved Sun Crests and to farming as an art. What comes out is a love song that ultimately revives market demand (he’s still happily growing those peaches today). But the book begins with urgent questions: What can I do? How can I live with myself if I lose this family farm?

But all of this starts with owning your authority. Say it with me: there is no such thing as block when you’ve conquered the doubt.

You have a story to tell. You have a life’s witness that no one else does. Believe that. Turn your authority into a list. That list will soon be teeming with scenes, and hopefully some of those scenes will have built-in perplexities that you’ll need to write your way through.

Where Do the Stories Come From?

Today’s guest post is excerpted from the new book The Curious Reader’s Field Guide to Nonfiction by Anne Janzer.

I happen to believe that every person on earth is a storyteller. We are all trying to understand the story of our lives.

—Steve Almond, Truth is the Arrow, Mercy is the Bow

In a sense, all writing originates from memoir, drawing on the writer’s own perspectives, observations, and stories. Many authors (including this one) fill books and essays with personal anecdotes.

Yet as readers, we often want to see ourselves or our situations reflected in the work—especially when reading advice. If we cannot picture ourselves, we may feel unwelcome. For example, a woman reading a book filled with profiles of men may feel subtly excluded, even if she doesn’t consciously realize the reason.

Nonfiction writers have to decide where to collect their stories and how much to rely on their personal experience.

For journalistic exposés, memoir, history, or other narrative nonfiction, the subject determines the story and characters. For books that explain or inspire, authors have a wide menu of options for choosing stories to support their ideas.

Personal experience

Writers’ own experiences are readily available, so they show up frequently. Sharing personal stories creates a sense of connection between reader and writer.

Early in the book Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less, Leidy Klotz tells the story of the moment he conceived of his area of study. He was using blocks to build a bridge with his young son. They needed to connect towers of different heights. While he automatically reached for a block to add to the shorter tower, his son simply removed a block from the taller tower. And in that moment, Klotz had an epiphany: if we want simpler, lower-impact designs, we must confront our knee-jerk instinct to solve every problem through addition. The story highlights the concept that anchors the entire book. (He also turned it into an experiment that confirmed the broader bias for addition.)

Other people’s stories

Many authors find stories through original research: interviewing subjects, surveying people, and otherwise being out in the world, physically or virtually. When they share stories of non-famous people, writers must introduce us to the characters. That can be a challenge.

Some authors are brilliant at drawing these characters—read any of Michael Lewis’s books about finance to meet people who come to life on the page. But not all writers are as adept. If we cannot feel a connection to or visualize the people, the stories will not carry as much power as they could.

How widely does the writer reach in gathering these stories? If they all come from the author’s own networks, readers outside those networks may feel excluded. For example, books about entrepreneurship that only profile venture-backed tech businesses may not not land with aspiring entrepreneurs in retail or service businesses.

Stories from the news, history, legends, or fictionAmazon • Bookshop

Stories embedded in popular culture are easy to access and often familiar to readers. But there’s a risk that the reader may have encountered them before. So many business books have relied on Steve Jobs’s story that it has become stale—an ironic legacy for such an innovative man.

Nonfiction books often combine stories from all of these sources. The right balance depends on what effect the author hopes the stories, in aggregate, will have on the reader.

We feel seen when the story represents people like us.We gain fresh perspectives when the stories highlight people different from us.We feel connected when writers share personal stories we can relate to.

The choice of stories itself tells a story.

5 Plot Hacks That Just Might Save Your Novel

Photo by Ron Lach

Today’s post is by regular contributor Susan DeFreitas (@manzanitafire), an award-winning author, editor, and book coach. On Thursday, Oct. 31, she’s offering a free masterclass on plot, The Bones of the Thing: The Truth About Plot (and the Most Common Plot Problems Writers Face).

I’ve said elsewhere on this blog that plot issues are the number one reason people come to me—and people like me—for help with their creative work.

And I’ve shared in the same post that most of the time, these issues really aren’t problems with plot at all. They’re problems with character arc.

That said, sometimes the problem really is the plot. Which is to say, sometimes the problem with a novel really is what happens in the story, the order in which it happens, and the way that it happens.

And for real problems of this nature, there are real solutions. Solutions that I have seen writers apply in revision that produce changes that feel nothing short of magical.

Struggling with the plot of your current work-in-progress? Maybe one of these tried and true solutions will do the trick for you.

1. Shorten the time frame

Some novels really just have to be big, sprawling epics that take place over a long period of time—perhaps even over generations. But most stories? Don’t.

If you have a novel that feels slow in places, a novel that chronicles a long period of time in the protagonist’s life, or a novel that chronicles a whole historical period … my best advice to you would be: See if there’s a way you can tighten the time frame overall.

Because when you tighten up the time frame, oftentimes those slow sections just somehow magically disappear. I believe this is in part due to the fact that when events occur close together in time, you get a stronger sense of cause and effect even if one event isn’t leading directly to the next. For instance, maybe your protagonist is still angry from her conversation with the antagonist the day before when he talks to his love interest later that day. If a week passed between these interactions, it wouldn’t feel like there was any connection between them.

But when you tighten up the time frame, that second interaction might feel like it’s invested with a whole lot more tension, because of the residual emotional effects of the first one.

For a novel that chronicles a long period of time in the protagonist’s life, you’re almost guaranteed to strengthen the sense of storytelling if you focus in on a shorter time frame—say, a turning point time in the protagonist’s life, which will still allow us to imaginatively fill in what happens in that longer span of time without having to plow through hundreds of pages of it.

Same thing for a novel that’s meant to chronicle a longer historical era: Focusing in on a turning point (or two or three) within that longer span of time will almost always have the effect of strengthening the story. Turning points have a lot of power, in that they give readers an opportunity to understand both what the situation was before as well as the new reality that’s coming into being.

2. Get rid of events (and characters!) that do the same work

If you’ve written a novel that’s waaaaaaay tooooo loooong (and you can determine that pretty quickly here if you know your genre—and you should!), then this may be a hard one to hear, because people who write novels that are way too long tend to feel rather attached to absolutely everything that happens within that novel, and everyone it happens with or to.

But trust me when I say, you can take this one to the bank: If there are two different events in your novel that have both been included in order to show your protagonist lacking the courage to take a stand for herself in the face of oppression, it will generally strengthen your story if you cut one of those events (or even combine the strongest elements of both events into a single one).

Same thing with characters: If there are two characters in your story who are basically there to show us how the protagonist doesn’t tend to recognize when her friends aren’t really her friends, you can probably cut one of them with no real impact on the main storyline.

And really, that in and of itself is a good litmus test, when it comes to events and characters you’re considering cutting: If you can do so without having to do a TON of revision to the story as a whole, then that just goes to show that event or character wasn’t doing a whole lot of work for the novel anyway.

3. Add a subplot or consequence

On the other hand, maybe you’re one of those people who’s written a pretty straightforward story in a pretty straightforward genre, one you understand well—a mystery, for example, or a romance. And the issue isn’t so much that your story is overstuffed so much that it is too flat.

In cases like these, you generally have too direct a path from the protagonist to their goal, for better or worse—and not enough in the way of complications.

One way to get more of that in your story—and more of a sense that your story has the sort of depth and density of “incident” we expect from a novel—is to introduce a subplot. One of my mentors, Jennie Nash, frames a subplot as an instance in the story where someone other than the protagonist decides that this is their story and starts pursuing their own agenda in a way that complicates that of the protagonist. 

And if you’re wondering where in your story to introduce such a subplot, may I suggest the “break into 2” point of the story—basically, the end of the first act, if you’re working with three-act structure (or, a third of the way into the story, period).

I suggest this because it’s far enough into the story for readers to have gotten to know some of the characters in the protagonist’s world (and therefore to understand how their agendas might conflict with that of the protagonist) and far enough into the story for things to start moving in the right direction for that protagonist (meaning, it’s a perfect time to throw a giant monkey wrench in the gears).

You can also introduce complication by looking at the events you already have in the story and asking yourself if any of these events could have further consequences for the protagonist—consequences that introduce similar complications in the course of their quest.

4. Start earlier

I’ve written elsewhere on this blog about how to figure out whether you’re starting your novel in the right place—and in that post, I shared the fact that sometimes writers (especially newer writers) think they have to start off with the big conflict and fireworks of their story’s inciting incident. Which tends to feel more confusing for the reader than anything else.

That’s because starting that late in the story’s timeline doesn’t give us the opportunity to get to know the protagonist before that event occurs.

For example: Aliens landing on the lawn of a suburban homeowner is an inciting incident is a potentially interesting situation. But aliens landing on the lawn of a suburban homeowner who happens to be the sort of guy who hates everyone who’s in any way different from himself and the people he grew up with—which is to say, a xenophobe—is a story.

If your beta readers tell you that it took them a while to get into the story, or that they liked it but were confused at first, try starting your story just a beat or two earlier, so you give your reader time to get to know your protagonist and their world before the major events of the story are set into motion.

5. Create a real climax

I couldn’t tell you the number of manuscripts I’ve read that have no real climax. Sure, they might feature some sort of conversation toward the end of the story between the protagonist and his estranged father, for example, but that scene doesn’t feel all that much different from similar scenes earlier on in the story.

Moreover, if this story features a central conflict not just between the protagonist and his father but between the protagonist and his boss, who strongly reminds him of his domineering, unreasonable, demeaning father, then the climax point of this story should also in some way intersect with and resolve that conflict.

In this hypothetical story, maybe the resolution of the conflict with the boss originally took place “off screen”—meaning, it was rendered via summary, not scene—and then there was this resolution with the father in a dramatic scene that takes place on the father’s deathbed.

A stronger version of this novel’s climax might be one that consists of two parts (both dramatized via scene): first, the protagonist stands up to the domineering boss at work, and is fired but doesn’t regret it; and then second, that interaction gives him the courage, in part, to tell his father the truth about their relationship, and call him out on all the various harm he’s caused over the years—and maybe the father surprises the protagonist by doing essentially the opposite of what the boss did, which is listening and even acknowledging that there may be some truth in what the protagonist is saying.

A climax in which all the core conflicts of the novel come to a more or less dramatic head—whether it takes place in just one scene or a series of scenes—is just generally more satisfying to read than one in which one or more of those core conflicts seem to just fizzle out, off the page, like a dud firework.

And generally speaking, in order to actually resolve those conflicts, you have to “push them out” in scene—meaning, you have to let the conversations run longer than in previous scenes, and let that conversation go to deeper, more fraught, and/or more vulnerable places than in those previous scenes.

If you’re currently wrestling with the plot of your work in progress, I hope one or more of these plot hacks resolves them for you. Now it’s your turn to share: What’s the toughest plot problem you’ve faced in one of your novels? And what was the solution you arrived at to address it?

Note from Jane: On Thursday, Oct. 31, Susan is offering a free masterclass on plot, The Bones of the Thing: The Truth About Plot (and the Most Common Plot Problems Writers Face).

3 Bad Ideas for More Creative Writing

Photo by Tasha Lyn on Unsplash

Today’s post is by author and innovation speaker Jason Keath.

I’m ready—desk set, lemon water in hand, the morning light is perfect. And yet the empty Google doc sits there mocking me, and the words won’t come.

It reminds me of playing Zelda with my dad in the 1980s. We played the game so often that it refused to start half the time. The screen would flicker with static and settle into a chaotic jumble of glitchy colors.

So, like anyone who has ever owned a Nintendo, we would blow on the cartridge. A few quick bursts of air, a hopeful restart, and we crossed our fingers. Sometimes it worked; sometimes it didn’t.

Creativity can feel a lot like those unreliable game cartridges. You’ve got all the tools, the experience, and the energy, but some unknowable dust from the universe blocks the brilliant ideas.

Every successful writer develops creative habits to help them get their version of Zelda back on the screen. I’ve been helping people improve their creativity skills for over 15 years, and when I run into a writing block, I turn to bad ideas. Specifically, three main shortcuts help me start new projects or quickly break out of a creative slump.

Let’s look at each of these methods. The goal is to help you generate a wider variety of ideas more quickly. Test them out and choose the one that best fits your process.

1. The Bad Idea Method

Bad ideas are a shortcut to creative thinking.

The Bad Idea Method is simple. Give yourself 10 minutes to write down 25 bad ideas. Depending on the creative challenge you’re facing, these could be 25 bad opening lines for a novel, 25 bad character traits, or 25 bad article topics.

Writing down bad ideas can feel a little awkward at first. You may not make it to 25 every time, but that’s OK. Do what you can. One of the biggest barriers here is letting go of your quality filters. Have an idea that doesn’t seem bad enough? Write it down. Too embarrassing? Write it down. Too boring? You guessed it, pen to page.

The perfectionist inside all of us will try to be picky and come up with “the best” bad ideas (whatever that means) or the bad ideas that are secretly really good ideas.

Like most things the more you exercise this muscle, the more effective it will be. A helpful key is to define what makes an idea bad for you. Start with two categories: the obvious and the absurd. Both are valuable for brainstorming, though it can feel unnatural to write them down at first.

Great ideas exist between the obvious and the absurd.

Why does this work? How does the Bad Idea Method help?

It works because there are so many benefits:

Bad ideas are easier to come up with, so you get started fasterBad ideas open your mind, giving us a larger variety of connections to work fromBad ideas lead to good ideas (absurd idea A leads to interesting idea B leads to great idea C)Bad ideas augment other ideas (obvious idea A + absurd idea B = great idea C)Sometimes a bad idea is actually a good idea (A=C)2. Constraint Questions

Another way to jumpstart the sleeping artist in your brain is to question your assumptions. For this exercise, you will write down 10 constraints and question them one by one.

Write down the guidelines, requirements, and expectations that you think of when defining what you are trying to write. Use these questions to get started:

Creative: What are the story, narrative, character, or plot constraints?Cultural: What are the social norms, practices, or expectation constraints?Market: What are the external trends, competition, or ecosystem constraints?Policies: Are there any constraints from internal guidelines or orders?Technical: Is there a constraint from a lack of tools or expertise?Resource: What are the budget, materials, bandwidth, or time constraints?Rules: What are the laws, regulations, or science constraints?

If you’re writing a fantasy book, your list might include a magic system or the word count deadline your publisher set. If you’re writing the opening hook for an article, the publication’s audience details and your article topics might provide many of the constraints you write down.

One by one, for each constraint, ask yourself what you would write if you ignored that constraint. Then combine multiple constraints from your list and ask the same question.

Creative people do versions of this in their heads all the time. Writing down constraints will help you work through these thought starters more quickly.

My favorite example of questioning constraints is the first iPhone. Steve Jobs not only wanted to build a new type of phone, he wanted a leap forward in design and function. Apple challenged assumptions about what makes a phone and instead prioritized user experience.

Before the first iPhone launched in 2007, every phone on the market included:

Physical keypads/keyboardsExternal antennasRemovable batteriesSmall displays (<40% of phone)A focus on calling and textingCall-in voicemailExpandable storage (SD cards)7–9 function buttons or more (call, end, speakerphone, mute, volume, directional pad)

Apple questioned and ignored all of these as false constraints.

Before 2007, manufacturers (and consumers) saw the list above as requirements. After the iPhone launched, this became a list of options. It’s remarkable how different the iPhone was compared to its competitors.

Apple changed the public context of how we think about phones by questioning almost every mobile phone constraint.

Listing assumptions is a quick way to gain creative momentum. Make a list of constraints, question them, and let that thought exercise guide your writing.

3. The Fast & Ugly Draft

Anne Lamott’s idea of an ugly “first draft” from Bird by Bird permitted writers to put bad words on the page without judgment. Starting with an imperfect draft gets ideas out faster than waiting for the perfect phrasing to appear.

This approach mirrors startup culture—building in public, launching beta products, and “failing fast.” Sharing imperfect work builds momentum. No matter how rough your draft is, you can always improve it, fixing smaller pieces here or there is easier than writing perfectly from the start.

Even though I embrace the ugly first draft, I still get stuck at times. So, I’ve added three rules to help me work faster—not just ugly, but fast and ugly.

1. Set challenging deadlines
When I start writing, I estimate how long it should take me and then I cut that time in half to set an unreasonable deadline. For instance, an average newsletter draft takes me about an hour, so instead I give myself 30 minutes. This forces me into an outline mode, reducing pressure and allowing me to view my writing from a broader perspective.

2. Restrict research time
Research can be a major rabbit hole for me. Once I recognized that, I began setting strict time limits—30 minutes for smaller tasks, 60 for larger projects. This helps me make my research more focused and directly useful for my writing.

3. Bracket unfocused work
Anything that slows down your ugly fast draft, like research, premature editing, or getting stuck on a word, should be set aside. Instead of switching tasks or losing momentum, [add a quick note for yourself in brackets]. I find brackets are faster and less disruptive than using the comment feature in Word or Google Docs.

The quicker you put something down on the page, the more momentum you create. Creative ideas and solutions become easier. Don’t get me wrong, it is important to slow down and take breaks at times. But an ugly, fast approach does wonders for helping me get over those moments of creative fatigue.

The faster you get ideas on the page, the more momentum you build. That momentum makes creative ideas appear more easily. While slow work and breaks have their place, an ugly, fast approach helps me push through creative fatigue.

Next time you’re staring at a blank page or feeling stuck, try bad ideas. Challenge yourself to list bad ideas, question a list of constraints, or start with a fast/ugly draft.

Set a timer and let me know how it goes!

Murky Middles Begone: Ensure the Middle of Your Book Stands Strong

Photo by Filip Mroz on Unsplash

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.

Join My Free Email Course on How to Earn a Living as a Writer

A new edition of my book, The Business of Being a Writer, releases in April 2025.

To mark the occasion, I’m offering a free, email-based course. Every Friday until my book releases, I’ll send you a key idea and exercise from the second edition on earning a living as a writer today.

Here is part of what I have in store for you:

A look at common misconceptions about earning a living from writingWhy book sales is not a good metric for successWhat it means to have a business model as a writerWhy focusing on whether you have talent (or “have what it takes”) can be an actively harmful concept for earning a livingA no-nonsense discussion of platform (most writers don’t in fact land book deals because of platform, but it does affect earnings potential)How relationship building affects your careerWhat it means to “find” your readers when you’re not a marketer or publicistAn explanation of lead generation and building a funnel for your writing businessHow to make the most of any book launch even if your publisher is missing in actionA look at patronage, crowdfunding, and other methods of reader supportFirst steps every writer should take regarding their finances and taxes

Expect a few special perks along the way.

Sign up now and don’t miss a thing.