When compared to the first chapter, the climax, the falling action, and the resolution, middles can be a nightmare. This is because unpredictability must suddenly become the norm. It’s not all that uncommon for novels to change course when authors get to the middle and their characters surprise them with unexpected behavior. Sometimes your characters know better than you do, and you should listen.
However, you absolutely MUST know how to manage the middle so that you are not pulling the rug out from under the reader. Yes, you certainly want the reader to lose his or her sense of balance a bit with regard to what’s going to happen. THAT’S called keeping the reader engaged and we all want to do that. It’s essential, though, for you to understand what’s supposed to happen in the middle of a novel, and this is the same regardless of the genre or the person doing the writing. This is the territory of the reversal, the wrinkle, the unexpected twist.
Save a Bullet
Don’t use all your bullets up in the first third of your book. It’s the kiss of death. Obviously, you want to engage the reader from the beginning, but to prevent that proverbial 50 pages of slog in the middle, make sure you introduce a twist, a major question for the reader– which you MUST answer by the end of the book– or even a complete reversal.
In my second novel, Cold Summer Wind the heroine more or less “came to her senses” in the middle of the novel (when the reader just KNEW it was too late.) This unanticipated shift ensured that the reader remained engaged in the story, because it put a whole new question into the person’s mind: now what’s going to happen? How is she going to get out of this mess even if she did come to her senses?
Increase the Intensity
Increasing the intensity creates a whole new world into which the reader is drawn, and this further invests him or her in the story. That’s a homerun, and you should seek to do it in every book you write. Whatever your character's issues or problems were at the beginning, make sure that they intensify in some kind of way in the middle. Rises and falls, twists and turns, valleys and ridges all keep the reader pleasantly off balance, and thus unwilling to put your book down. Simple advice, but it’s worth its weight in gold.
Write on!
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