Spinning the Middle

I'm writing this post at the end of the middle.

Mostly, I'm waiting for 360-odd pages to print out, which involves a tedious amount of aligning, cartridging, configuring, and patience.

But it will pay off--I'll be able to edit my work over the weekend.

For the past nine months, I've been in the middle. I started in late January at the end of the beginning and here I am at the beginning of the end. The in-between has been a long, weary, trying adventure of getting from one abstract point in a project to another.

(To continue this extended metaphor: I get one measly page into the printing job and the printer chokes on my paper and makes a big gristly mess in the spool. Reset, retry.)

The project in question, a novel, has three parts or acts, as you will. So by necessity, there has to be a "middle" act.

I've always found the middle of longer works to be the least interesting. Take The Two Towers, for instance, which I find to be my least favourite section of The Lord of the Rings. Sure, it's subjective, but I believe there's something inherently systemic about boring middle books, and it boils down to the process of writing them.

I began the story in May 2011 in a fit of emotional angst and repression of the sort that can only give birth to a novel of this length. So I began to write it, transforming an old project into a new one and picking up from there.

Chapter after chapter flew out from there. The story told itself. I free-wrote a lot of it, unsure exactly where the plot or web of the story would lead but eager to find out. Part One took pretty easy shape: a story about a theatre and the worlds within it made a lot of sense and developed nicely to what we'll call Plot Point #1 roughly 25 chapters in.

Plot points are a fairly easy way of thinking about narrative arc used in screen and game-writing to create malleable, if perhaps slightly expected, plot developments. Star Wars is the easy example: Luke Skywalker's character development is a series of prescribed events that escalate the problem.

Once, say, Luke leaves Tatooine, we hit the "middle" of A New Hope. Once the Death Stars does a firework, we hit the middle of the original trilogy.

I'll opine here that the span with Luke on the Millennium Falcon learning Jedi tricks to his arrival at the rebel base is the most boring part of the film. I imagine it was also the hardest to write and act. It essentially links Luke's history to Luke's objective. All that really happens is Luke watches Obi-Wan get killed by Vader, and rescues Leia, neither of which is really strong enough to be a plot point on its own.

This section forms a rising action to the rebel attack: the climax. It links. That's all it does, with entertaining scenes along the way. Plot Point #2 in A New Hope is probably the plan to attack the Death Star spelled out: it represents the height of the development before the climax. Everything between Point #1 and Point #2 is travel time.

Think of a family vacation: you begin with initial excitement about the eventual destination, lots of fun for the older people in the exactitudes of planning, and so on. By the "middle," the rising action, you've had your first flat tire, family squabble, and horrendous dining-on-the-road experience. None of it will really ruin the fun of camping in the Laurentians Everyone will remember the massive rainstorm once there that flooded the tent. But the intervening bits get you there, like a good game of "Are We There Yet?" without a major problem (such as putting the book down, walking out of the theatre, or turning around).

I finished Part One of my story in late November, and proceeded to give it a cursory edit. I was pretty happy to have it done and eager to move on, but I wanted things to be consistent first. I added a few chapters, cut a few others, and moved on in January.

Immediately I felt like I was writing filler, spinning my wheels on a plot that had been vibrant but was trudging along now, sometimes quite literally. The direction was there, even--I had a goal in mind. But it took so long to get it there. Sure, the story probably needs a little tightening and maybe a couple of better scenes. But mostly, the problem is we're developing, and developing of any kind takes time--in this case nearly 40 chapters of it (!).

In the "middle" of my project, one protagonist has to work out a contradiction of identity. Another has to find pieces of history scattered around. Neither of these is an unentertaining pursuit exactly and there are some good scenes, but you can feel the hollowness of even the best line or the heroic action. Inevitably, it has to build to something larger, namely, Part Three.

That's not a bad feeling. Look at The Empire Strikes Back. It opens with a bit of a nothing battle (Hoth) and then a fairly crucial if, frankly, boring plot point in Yoda's teaching of Luke. It's crucial to the story in resolving, philosophically, who and what Luke is. The movie ends with another key development in the direction of the saga: Han gets frozen. This sets up the third movie with a perfect hook (because we all know Han is coming back somehow) and sets up the climax of Luke's first fight with Vader. Return of the Jedi doesn't work without Empire Strikes Back being there.

The middle part is entertaining enough. A good middle has its own arc, its own strands and narratives that rise and climax specifically within it (Han and Lando in Empire; a failing fortress in my project) to provide entertainment value. But as parts of the whole, they serve Part Three. It's difficult to have a story-defining battle in a middle section because at least one protagonist has to live. There has to be a greater villian, or there wouldn't be a Part Three, would there? The hero can't save the world just yet, nor can the grail be found two-thirds through.

Tolkien does a decent job avoiding this in The Two Towers by making Saruman a strong villian in his own right and a villian quite distinct from Sauron himself. So readers gain something from the escalation in Rohan to Helm's Deep, and best of all there are layers beneath it to analyze and enjoy. But in the end, the Saruman episodes are still partially outside the main saga: they don't involve Frodo and Sam and the major quest at all.

The process of composing a middle section, therefore, involves checking in again and again to make sure the link between parts is served. It's no good to simply create scenes of trudging from Point A to Point B, just as it's no good to entertain the reader in Part Two only to contradict Parts One and Three. Every event has to reach back to a previous hook and foreshadow a new one in the future.

The practical effect of this process, I found, was a massive need for outlining. Leaving notes for myself was the only way I could keep the layers of meaning and plot consistent with what I'd already written. It meant that whenever I started to speed up into a new section with the same gusto I had for the first act, I had to slow down and tinker with everything to keep all the references and details consistent.

I tried spinning wool once at an exhibition and was absolutely terrible at it. I would just start getting something recognizable when I'd have to pull everything straight and spin again. It felt like such a long, arduous process: spin, braid, reset; braid again, spin some more, and set again. It took hours and hours for me to make a very, very small strand of wool. But according to the woman watching me (while spinning her own wool so much more easily), I was doing the right thing. It just takes time and patience.

Each strand of a story has to be woven together if we want it to hold anything. The strands that the free-writing of Part One--all those wonderful ways the story could go that it made the world feel almost limitless--don't quite work together. Spin too much and they'll become a nasty mess. The hand has to be light and very patient, indeed.

Several of the chapters in my second part are garbled--the result of spinning too much wool through too quickly. At the slightest tug they come loose and have to be re-done.

I tell myself that it will pay off in Part Three--after all, I always like Return of the King and Return of the Jedi most. The sense of completion and of strands finally coming together to form the whole of an ending is my favourite part both of reading and writing.

Needless to say, the more threads of wool you have, the more spinning is required.

With that thought, I'm giving up on fixing the printer and going to bed. I'll spin on here again some time soon.