In The Demon's Head: Story Art; Your Middle, Your LIfeline

In The Demon's Head #57: Story Art; Treat Your Middle: Your Lifeline

September 5, 2012

Hello everyone and welcome to edition number 57 of In The Demon's Head, today we continue our journey into Story Art by discussing why the middle of any piece of writing is your lifeline. In case you've missed it we've already talked about the beginning of pieces, and how to generate ideas, so I figured in logical order we'd talk about the middle.

Now to clarify I recently read part of a book called the portable MFA in Creative Writing. It's a book featured on Writer's Digest.com and I would suggest picking up a copy because so far it's made me look at things a lot differently and one of those things is the middle of your story, not for how important it is, but how it's built so let's start there.

I was reading this book and they talked about how your beginning raises the question and how you end your beginning and merge into the middle. First off, the middle is usually built of three pieces where a beginning, middle, and end of the middle. The middle merges into the end and of course the end is your story conclusion.

Now onto the answer for the question I posed in the title, Your Middle; Your lifeline. The question is, is that a true statement with the answer being a resounding yes.

Why do I call your middle the lifeline? Because the middle serves as the lifeblood of your work, if it becomes boring your reader will skip right to the end of the book to find out the answers they seek, or worse they'll just stop reading period, then your repeat reader is lost and worse they'll pass the information along to their friends.

But just what makes the middle good? Three things, great writing, conflict, and something that ties the beginning to the end, and of course it has to be interesting. A reader wants to be attached to a story that carries them through the ups and downs and makes the characters 3 dimensional and fun to follow.

There are other elements that goes into the middle but if you can write a compelling middle to your story and help develop your character into something special then you'll have no problem writing a great book that many people want to read.

That's going to do it for me for this edition of “In The Demon's Head” I will be back on Friday with the final post about how to write a good ending. If you have any questions about any of the post please don't hesitate to ask by writing me an email here. Until the next time that you want to take a trip through the gates of hell and into the Demon's Head I'm Kyle Robinson wishing you a safe trip back to surface.