21.13: Does The Middle Have To Be Soggy?

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Writing Excuses Introduction

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3:03Season 21, episode 13.

3:08This is Writing Excuses. Does the middle have to be soggy? Tools, not rules. For writers, by writers. I'm Mary Robinette. I'm Dong Wan. I'm Erin. And we are talking about the soggy middle, which is a phrase that you hear over and over again. Middles are often seen as the sagging, sagging, sogging, of any storyline. But the truth of it is that most of the story actually happens in the middle.

3:39Like, whether it's novel, whether it's short form, most of it is middle. You've got a frame, which is your beginning and end, but most of it is the middle, and it's like how you handle that. Transitioning out of the beginning into what's happening into the middle, what I call the end of the middle, and then towards the end. So, does the middle have to be soggy? I mean, I should hope not, because soggy feels like a very unexciting slog of an experience, right? And, you know, I think when I'm reading an opening or reading copy or like I'm talking to a writer about a project, a question I find myself asking a lot is what are people actually doing in this book, right?

4:21Like, give me some idea of what the action of this book is. Are they mostly walking from point A to point B in a Lord of the Rings style, right? Is it big council meetings? Is it, you know, what does that look like for this book in terms of what are your characters actually doing to engage with the world and advance the plot, right? And so, I think when the middle feels soggy is when there's a really unclear answer to that. Or you've chosen a thing for them to do that's very boring, right? So, if they just walk from point A to point B, but nothing happens or there's not an interesting question embedded in that, that's when it starts to feel like, wait, what is the point of this?

4:59Yeah, I probably should have said, what do we mean when we say soggy? Yeah. And it's that, that there's nothing going on. I think personally that there's a couple of reasons that the middle will often feel soggy to the writer, even if it doesn't last that way until we get to the, to publication.

5:22So, one of those is that, that there's a mode switch that happens at the end of the middle where you have to transition from let's make things worse to now we start to have some successes. We have to start, even if, even if you're ahead of doing horror, we still have to start closing story questions and wrapping things up, which is harder in a lot of ways. And so, it can feel like a slog because you have to change your mindset about how you're handling it.

5:54And a lot of times you're also entering a phase where you just want to be done with the book. So, I think that some, those are some things about why that can happen to the writer. Yeah, it's funny. I've always heard it called the mushy middle and I actually don't know if that is the same thing or just a different thing that goes wrong. Middles are bad. No, middles are most of the story. Let's examine the difference between mush and sog. Wow. Sounds like a fun Saturday night. But, I think that, like, I was thinking about what Dong-Won said about the action of, like, what's the action of the story?

6:27Because it makes me think about when games fail, when, like, video games fail, because most games will have, like, something that's an action. Like, are you fighting? Are you talking? Are you jumping? What are your verbs? So, are you, what? What are your verbs? What are your verbs? And so, if the verbs don't match, like, what they feel like the story should be, it can, at first, you're just like, oh, I'm learning these verbs. This is really interesting. But if you're like, wait a second, this seems like it should, I should be running, but all I'm doing is talking. I can't actually, like, this is a story about forward momentum and I'm still.

7:00Then it starts to feel like, okay, the time is slogging down. Like, I don't want to be here anymore. So, I think that's a great way to frame it. I see it, that lack of forward agency, because I think one of the things that will happen is that sometimes people will do that on purpose because there's some big piece that they're trying to get to. And so, like, oh, I have the big battle, but it's not time for my character to get to it yet. They have to work harder or something. It's like, I need it to happen at the three-quarter part of whatever thing they have said in their head about why they can't have it happen now.

7:36And so, they'll do something that I see as stalling, where they include actions that are not, like, not things that the character needs to do in order to progress. They deliberately put in something to slow the character down, but it's so obviously a hurdle that could be easily surmounted. But it seems like it's there just because they feel like, for whatever reason, it's not time for the big thing to happen yet.

8:07And then it can feel like either busy work, right, of just we're doing a bunch of stuff because we're supposed to be doing it, not because it's inherently interesting. Or it'll just feel very frustrating because it's like, obviously, the answer is X. We know the answer is X. The character's not allowed to realize that that's the answer. Yeah. So, now we're just wandering around for a long time. It's a very specific example, but, you know, I've been watching the Silo TV show and really loving it. And the second season, about a third of it is kind of, I can tell exactly where this is going.

8:39And now we're going to spend a lot of time spinning our wheels to get there. And I think that's when it feels soggy. I think it feels soggy when it's like, I can see where you're going. I know where this road goes, but we're not there yet. And there's not an interesting reason why we're not there yet. And I think when you're trying to stretch that out, you know, that's when it starts to feel very like, what are we doing? Yeah. It sometimes feels like also there's a difference, like there's external versus internal. And what I mean by this is like, the big fight is external.

9:11I feel like a lot of times people are like trying to delay an external thing that's going to happen. Therefore, they throw a lot of external like obstacles in the character's way. But there's no internal growth. Like, so it's like your growth is paused while you just do this thing and that thing. It's like a training montage. But there's a reason that training montages are montages and not like, actually, we go to the gym with you for a year while you master karate. Because like, it's not that interesting, like outside, you know, it's not just a fun thing to watch. Yeah. And the same thing can happen with an emotional plot line, too.

9:45Like in a romance where they have the artificial breakup in order to prevent having the big cathartic makeout sex scene happening too early when it's clear that they really want to. Or, you know, introducing some weird action moment in order to stop that forward character growth. And that can be like, come on, we just let us have the thing we want. And I think the thing that breaks a romance plot for me personally is when the thing interrupting the romance, when they have that fight in the middle and it's like, are they going to reconcile?

10:17When it's clearly a nothing burger thing, right? When it's just a miscommunication or it's just somebody's like inventing something in their head and you're like, this is nothing. They're going to get together because they should be together. I think when that works, there's a real difference in perspective and there's a real mode in which somebody says or does something. You know, I think about how my favorite Austin adaptations are ones where Darcy is genuinely unpleasant. When it's like, oh, I get why you might not like this guy initially because he's kind of like the Fire Island one, which is like a really lovely, very fun, frothy, queer one.

10:56But the Darcy analog character in that is like a genuine dick for the first half of that movie in a way that's like really fun. And then when you see the turn, it gets exciting, right? But if you don't actually put that friction there, if you don't have the commitment to be like, oh, my hot love interest is also sometimes a jerk. You know what I mean? It's another version of the like, you know, unattractive girl takes her glasses off and suddenly she's beautiful, right? It's like, yeah, we can tell she's beautiful the whole time. That is famous Hollywood starlet.

11:27You know what I mean? And so you need to give us like really tangible reasons for that obstacle to exist and believable reasons. When they feel thin and flimsy, that's when things feel slow. Yeah. I'm going to mention one other failure mode and then we're going to go to the break. And then after the break, we'll talk about tools for addressing them. The other failure mode that I see in the thing that I think causes a soggy middle is repetitive beats where it's either, oh, are we fighting the zombies again?

11:59But it's like, oh, now instead of in the kitchen, we're in the pantry. Oh, it's still food stuff that we're fighting them with. It's like you haven't actually changed anything. This is me trying to play Last of Us where at some point I was like, I cannot clear another room of zombies. I don't care about this anymore. Yeah. Oh, my God. I know. I'm wrong. No, no, no. This is a minority position. But I'm interested when we get to tools after the break, because having written a thing where you just fight zombies all the time, we had to think about how do you make it more interesting the 18 millionth time you do it?

12:30Yeah. Yeah. Because it's fine for it to be the same problem. It's just the, oh, and we're doing that again. So repetitive beats, either in physical action or the emotional action, where a character is like, oh, woe is me. I am, I will never be popular. I should make some changes. Oh, but I will never be popular. It's like, okay, but who cares? You should just, not that it's that easy to change your mind in real life, but also, I want better for my fictional characters.

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Addressing Repetition and Stalling

21:07Welcome back. We are still in the middle of the podcast. And hopefully it's not too soggy or mushy. What we are going to talk about is some tools that you can use to address things like repetition, stalling, that mode change. So, one of the things that you can do with the repetitive beats is a tool that we've already talked about, which is the same but different.

21:34Like, with the zombies run, you had to use the same but different kind of all the time. All the time. And we had, like, a list because it was, like, first of all, you don't have to do a lot, as I said when I was using this example last time, to change it. So, one thing we said is, like, closer. So, like, same zombies, same place, but they're closer than you thought. There are more of them. They do something you didn't expect. They are different in some way, usually worse. Or there's an emotional, like, implication to what they did that, you know, is really, really bad.

22:07I still think of one of my, I guess, to spoil zombies run, I guess, close your ears. But there is a character who turns out to be immune from zombies whose mother became a zombie and mother was killed. And there is this huge question of, could he have kept his mother around because he didn't realize he was immune at that time? And so, any time there has to be something where it's, like, he's immune and therefore he can just run through it, but it becomes this big emotional way of, like, what does this say about the way I handled things with my, you know, had to put an axe in my mother's head type of thing.

22:40Like, and therefore it's different and it's worse each time that I think about it. And so, it changes the character of it, even though the one person who's immune running through a crowd of zombies is theoretically the same. I think that this is a really smart thing. And it's a tool that you can use, even if you aren't dealing with zombies, is that one of the things that you can change is your character's response to the thing happening again. So, this is what you see often in time loop stories, where it is literally the same beats happening again, but the character is often having different emotional responses.

23:13And so, that's an example of same but different. Because you need to feel that growth of the character over time, too. So, if they're encountering something that's same but different, they need to have change. One of the things that has to be different is the person experiencing it. Yeah. And then there's the other thing, the stalling, which, where you are putting off the big thing because you need to save it for later. One of the secrets that I have found as a writer is that, actually, you can just go ahead and have the big thing happen.

23:43A hundred percent. And if the story is going to be over too soon because you let the big thing happen, you can then look at the ramifications of the big thing happening. You can have an escalation from that thing, but you don't need to stall for getting to it. Don't force it. Don't, yeah. Do you think that ever, like, messes with people? Like, if there's a certain, like, if you're in a structure in which people are used to certain things in their genre, like, they're like, this is going to end with the glorious space battle or the make-out session of the marriage of the romance and you do end up moving it forward.

24:20Like, do you risk losing people in that way? I mean, I think yes and no. I think what people fell in love with Game of Thrones was it did this exact thing. It moved the death of the hero way early in that series. And then it was so thrilling because it was like, damn, we are in new territory. The person who I thought was the hero of this story got his head chopped off, like, a quarter of the way through that book. Spoilers, I guess. I don't know if for the entire concept of the series. You know, but when that happens, it is this thing that really catapults us into this new territory of, like, we're in a new kind of storytelling, right?

24:52So that's what's really exciting. On the flip side, I think Game of Thrones is one of the best examples of what we might call a soggy middle because, you know, people have been very frustrated with the last couple of books. I personally adore them, but I think the reason people are frustrated is a shift in reader expectations. I think the readers, in spite of having been told we're in a new type of thing, keep expecting it to return to the expectations of the genre. And I think the last book in particular indicates a real lack of interest in the epic fantasy tropes of the heroic ending that we're all expecting.

25:29And what, instead, those books are interested in are kind of soggy middle stuff of just a bunch of characters wandering around the world interacting with things, which, once I realized that, I had a great time with it because I'm like, oh, I'm just going to spend time with these people in this world, and that's really fun. So long as I don't care about what happens at the end of this story. Yeah, yeah. And that, a lot of it is really the, let me signal to you what I'm reading. Like, I just finished reading this Japanese novel called Tatami Galaxy, and it's a time loop kind of story, sort of.

26:05Anyway, so there's a bunch of things that you see happen more than once, and it really is this character just bumbling around. But once you realize, oh, that's what this story is about, about, you know, someone who can't get their act together, then you're like, I understand the ride now, and this is, you know, and carry on, please, and amuse me. I think one of the other things that you can think about when you're doing the stalling is, it's like, no, I do actually have a really good reason for wanting to delay this until this point.

26:37Then you can look at the kind of escalation that you've got leading up to that, because a lot of times what will happen is a tension drop. Because we all know, as we said, as Dong-Won said previously, we all know what it is that they're supposed to do. So, and that's where you are, you're stalling by doing repetitive beats. So, one of the things that I will look at often is, I will look at what the mice quotient elements are that I have active. So, it's just a refresher, milieu, inquiry, character, and event, and each of those can be a major story driver.

27:15So, if I have something that is predominantly a milieu story, like Silo, there's a lot of, like, we're in this place, and we have to explore and move around this place. Then I can, just for a chapter, introduce a totally different type of conflict that's going to be resolved. This is often what you will see, I think, in some shows where it's like, and suddenly we have the musical episode. Or a bottle episode. Yeah, yeah.

27:46So, you can do something like that in the story as long as it feels, as long as it feels like there's still a connected causal chain. That introducing this other, like, this other aspect of whatever it is that's gone wrong. You know, so, if you have had a character who has been dealing with this major status quo shift the entire time, they're trying to, you know, defeat the evil overlord. And then you do this one chapter where they have to deal with an orphan as a symbol of this larger status quo.

28:19Now they're dealing with this character issue. And it's just a ramification of that. You have to resolve that cleanly before you can move on. Otherwise, readers are going to be like, but what about the orphan? Well, and I think one of the ways in which this really works and can reinforce the overall arc of your story is by using sort of, like, microcosm, macrocosm, right? A smaller iteration of the bigger question. It needs to feel connected. But so long as that we, as the audience, can sort of see connective tissue to the central questions of your book,

28:50and we can see that this is exploring some offshoot or thought experiment or aspect or consequence of it, I think that can keep us engaged through the action of it. Even if the try-fail cycle of this subplot is not connected to the overall success, right? I think a show that does this incredibly well is Scavenger's Reign, which is one of my favorite shows of recent years. Each episode is very episodic of, like, here's a new situation, here's a new monster, here's a new thing they're dealing with. But how they deal with it is central to the thematic questions of the show of what is it to be in community with other people?

29:26What is it to exist within a larger system, right? Right. And because each of the try-fail cycles that they encounter are addressing that bigger question, it always feels engaging and exciting. And also, there's a part of it of, like, they're just good little stories, too. You have to make sure that when it feels like you're wasting my time is when you're actually wasting my time, right? Yeah. And executing on these sort of mini arcs, you have to put as much thought and care into them as you would for any other arc, even if it is kind of a side story or a side quest.

29:57Yeah. And I think that's the key, is one of the other things that will happen with those is during that stalling, you can do a side quest that isn't connected and isn't going to, like, I read something where they were, the side quest was, we're going through these very tall poisonous plants. No one venture off the path and touch one of the poisonous plants. And shocking everyone here, someone ventures off the path and touches one of the poisonous plants. What? And someone is like, fortunately, I have this antidote. And they give it to them and they continue on their way.

30:27And I'm like, what was even the point of that? Yeah, that's nothing. Yeah. But the thing with the side quest, like, whether it's the orphan or whatever it is, is that that keeps it from being just a side quest that keeps it connected, is if it has impact on the character that affects the way they are dealing with everything that follows that. But that's, it's like, I sometimes say, it's like, if you're on a road trip and you have to pull off the interstate to get gas, you may as well make it interesting. Yeah. And, you know, if you're on a road trip and there's a roadblock, you may as well make it interesting.

31:01But there's no point in going to go look at the world's largest ball of twine if it's going to take you 500 miles off your... Yeah. The character needs to change or our understanding of the character needs to change. Yes. Or of the world. Or of the world. And if none of those things are happening, then truly cut it. This doesn't belong here. And you need to find another way to pad out the word count of your book. Yes. So, I'm glad as we were coming towards the end of this that you mentioned try-fail cycles, because next week we are going to be talking about try-fail cycles,

31:31which is another way you can adjust pacing and things in the middle. And we're going to get really granular at that. So, I'm going to give you some homework. I want you to grab a book or a short story, and I want you to read the first page, then the page that's in the exact middle, and then the page at the end. And what story threads from the middle, from the beginning, are still alive in the middle?

32:02Like, when you look at the beginning, it's like, there's this character, and they seem really unhappy. Is that character still around in the middle? Sometimes that's going to be a product of, like, it being a multi-POV. But, like, what's going on, and how do you think that that is working? This has been Writing Excuses.

Conclusion and Homework

32:24You're out of excuses. Now go write.

32:29Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. Your hosts for this episode were Mary Robinette Kowal, Don Juan Song, and Aaron Roberts. This episode was engineered by Marshall Carr, Jr., mastered by Alex Jackson, and produced by Emma Reynolds. For more information, visit writingexcuses.com. If the world were like a Sleep Number mattress, everything would adapt for your comfort. Because as your life changes and your body changes,

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33:31Sleep Number mattresses adapt and shift to give you personalized comfort night after night. And now everything's on sale during our Memorial Day event. Save up to $1,200 on mattresses, plus free delivery when you add a base. Ends Monday. To experience a whole new world of comfort, visit a Sleep Number store or go to sleepnumber.com. Sleep Number, to a good life's sleep.

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