Editing the Sagging Middle
Ah, the sagging middle. Also called the muddle, the slog, the struggle, and other depressing nicknames. The middle of the story is known to cause existential dread among authors as they toil over it.
You’ve surely encountered problems with a sagging middle before in a novel you’ve read. A story starts off with a bang! And then something happens, or, actually, nothing happens or what happens is so confusing you can’t make heads or tails of it . . . and you lose interest. You wander off, never to return to the book. There’s nothing to bring you back.
You’ll encounter these types of problem middles as an editor, too, and unfortunately when you’re getting paid, you can’t wander off, never to return.
What SHOULD Happen in the Middle
The middle is the meat of the story, its heart, the main event, the part of the manuscript that explores the story problem and shows us who the characters are. Without a solid middle, a promising beginning and a spectacular end won’t make any difference. Readers will not enjoy the book.
The middle is where the plot plays out, the characters are developed, the conflict intensifies, and stakes and consequences fill the page. That is, if the author knows what they’re doing. Otherwise, the middle is where we yawn through tepid conversations, pointless plot events, and character change that comes out of nowhere.
Middles are very difficult to get right.
Authorial Obliviousness
One of the reasons manuscripts can have what I call sagging middles—middles that are boring, confusing, or otherwise unengaging—is because authors aren’t aware that they’ve lost the plot. They may have difficulty noticing when their stories have started to sag. (This is not always the case; authors can sometimes be aware that the middle of their ms sags, they just don’t always know what to do about it.)
I was once part of a writers’ group where one of the members, let’s call her Amanda, would read her work aloud, declaiming each scene like an actor—raising her voice when a character was angry, whispering when a character was scared, evoking the emotion through her voice.
The problem was . . . the emotion wasn’t on the page. Eventually the group leader started having other people read Amanda’s work so that Amanda could hear what was actually on the page, not what was in her mind as she wrote.
Authors often need us to be the ones who read their work to them (metaphorically speaking) so they can hear what’s missing.
