The F Words: Writing from the Middle

My usual method for writing a novel is to come up with a situation first (as in a woman playing major league baseball), then create both the characters and plot within that situation. As I’m thinking of these things (often this takes months and months), I envision the novel’s beginning and its ending — so that, when I sit down to write the book, I know how it starts, and I know how it ends.

Everything in between is unknown. So I usually take it step by step: event A causes event B, which causes event C, and so on, all the way to the end. Everything between the beginning (usually the first and sometimes second chapter) and the ending (usually the last and sometimes also the next-to-last chapter) is considered the novel’s Middle.

Ninety percent or so of the entire book is called its middle. Laughable, isn’t it? No wonder writers have trouble with the middle of their books. That’s little different from saying they have trouble with the whole book!

For who knows what reason, however, I didn’t write The F Words in quite the same way I had written all my other books. Back when I started writing it, I had just read about and purchased a short book titled Write Your Novel from the Middle, by James Scott Bell. I remember that I read a mention of this book somewhere and I was intrigued. Mainly because I couldn’t imagine writing a novel from the middle.

What did this mean, I wondered? You start writing at the middle and write some chapters backwards, to the beginning, and others forward, to the end? That didn’t sound pleasant. And, really, I wanted to know: what was this approach? How did it work?

So I bought the book and read it in one sitting. And what the author means is that a good movie or good novel is structured in such a way that the main character has a “look in the mirror” moment in almost the exact middle of the movie/novel. This is an important moment of self-assessment. All the first half of the novel leads up to that moment, and all the second half of the novel leads away from the decision of that moment. (Really, the book should be titled something like Write Your Novel Toward the Middle.)

Well, I thought: this makes a lot of sense! And so I considered the moment of self-assessment that my main character, Cole Renner, would probably have. It took me maybe a day of thinking to figure it out, but when I did, I had an Aha moment.

Knowing what Cole would think and decide at the midway point of the novel allowed me to aim toward that moment, and then, once I got there, aim toward the results of his decision: the ending. 

In my previous method of writing novels, it’s as if  I were running a Marathon with no visual markers: doable, for sure, but difficult to judge “where” one is in the book. That is, difficult for me to judge what should be happening where. I would  have been better off if I had thought of the Marathon as running from Chicago’s south side northward to the halfway point of the John Hancock Building, and then continuing northward from there. The John Hancock Building would be visible to me every step of the way for the first half of the race. It would be a visual marker of what I was heading toward and how far away (or how close) it was.

Having a middle point of my novel to aim at made the writing process much, much faster. I’m not sure why that was, but I think that’s because it’s a lot easier to think only of the events leading up to the midpoint, without having to worry about the events that come after. In other words, I thought about one half of the book, not the whole book. This didn’t seem as daunting.

For me, choosing the middle point of The F Words worked extremely well. Knowing that middle point helped me plot the story better and also really helped me strengthen the book’s theme, because Cole’s midpoint decision is strongly tied to the conclusion.

Writing toward the middle also, unexpectedly, helped me with the poetry that Cole creates. More about that in my next blog.

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The F Words is available for Pre-Order wherever books are sold: from the publisher, City of Light Publishing; from IndieBound, the site for independent bookstores; from Barnes & Noble; and from Amazon. To get updates and the latest news on The F Words, subscribe to Barbara Gregorich’s Newsletter.