Introduction to Plotting the Novel's Middle

In Plotting the Novel's Beginning you learned how to introduce the novel's central character, how to give them a goal, then how to make them act on that goal.

You have now reached the exciting part of plotting a novel, the part where the action kicks in.

If the beginning was characterized by Rising Action, your job as a writer now is to keep hold of the audience's attention.

Once again, I have simplified the process of plotting a novel's tricky middle section by breaking it down into three steps.

But before looking at these steps in detail, I want to talk about plotting the novel's middle in general terms.

Plotting the Novel's Middle - An Overview

In the article on Plot Structure, I talked about fiction having three parts (or three "acts"). The first part is the beginning, when the character decides to act. The middle phase of the novel then deals with the action itself.

"What you do in Act II, the middle, is write scenes - scenes that stretch the tension, raise the stakes, keep readers worried."
- James Scott Bell

It is useful to think of Act II as the start of the character's "journey" (whether they are making a physical journey or not).

For the whole of the first act, they remain at "home" - or in a world which is familiar to them.

At the start of the novel's second act (the middle), they set out on their journey and enter a world which is not familiar and not safe.

In some novels, this will be a literal departure - the ship leaving the harbour, the explorer setting out for the South Pole, the young man leaving home to find his place in the world.
In other novels, it will be more metaphorical - the boy entering the wonderful but terrifying world of dating girls, the idealistic woman entering the murky world of politics.
Or it might, of course, be a combination of the two.

Once in this strange new world, the character doesn't immediately set out to achieve their ultimate goal (because plotting the novel's middle wouldn't take very long if they did). Instead, they go through a process of...

Learning the "rules" of this new world.
Making allies and enemies.
Discovering new things about themselves - not least, how far their courage stretches.

The journey isn't simple by any means. It is frequently a case of one step forward and two steps back. But little by little, despite all the setbacks, they will gradually edge closer to the object of their quest.

That's great, I can hear you say, but it doesn't tell me how to go about plotting the novel's middle in a practical, step-by-step way.

No, it doesn't. But it should all start making more sense once I have introduced you to the essential building block of a novel's middle section...

Mini Plots

Most things that we do in life, we do by breaking down into smaller steps. Even something simple like buying the morning paper involves...

Finding some money.
Crossing the road to the shop without getting hit by a car.
Finding the correct newspaper on the shelf.
And so on...

And it is exactly the same thing with a character in a novel. The way they achieve their overall goal (the one they came up with during the novel's opening) is to break it down into a series of mini goals.

Think of plotting the novel's middle like trying to get from one side of a river to another...

The near bank of this river represents the novel's beginning. The character is still on dry land at this stage. If they wanted, they could take the decision not to act and stay where they are. But they don't do that - they commit to achieving their goal.

The object of their quest is represented by the far bank. If they can make it there, they will have succeeded. But to get from where they are now to where they want to be, they will have to cross the water.

Now, this river has rocks jutting out of the water. The way that the character will reach the far side is by jumping from one rock to the next, all the way across. (They might slip along the way and get wet, but hopefully they won't be swept away and fail to reach the far bank at all.) So...

Their overall goal in the novel is to reach the far bank.
The rocks they will use as stepping stones each represents a mini goal.

But a mini goal, of course, is only one element of an entire mini plot.

In all, there are five of them...

Goal
Conflict
Resolution
Reaction
New Goal

(Actually, there are only four elements, because the fifth phase of a "Mini Plot A" - deciding on a new goal - is also the first phase of "Mini Plot B". That's what makes them so great for plotting the novel's middle - they simply snap together!)

(And while I'm making asides, remember that I'm just explaining the theory here. I'll show you how to put all of this "mini plot" stuff into practice when I talk in detail about plotting the novel's middle.)

Back to the 5 phases of a mini plot. Here they are in more detail...

Mini Plot Step 1: The Character Decides to Act on a Goal

This isn't their overall, novel-sized goal, remember, but one of the smaller steps towards it. Their overall goal is to reach the far bank, but right now they are just concentrating on reaching the first rock.

Mini Plot Step 2: They Encounter Conflict

The key to plotting the novel successfully is that you must not make life too easy for your fictional characters.

If their goal is to reach the first rock and they step onto it without even taking their hands out their pockets, it won't exactly make for riveting drama.

Make them have to take a long run up. Make the landing surface slippery. Stick a couple of crocodiles in the water. In short, introduce conflict.

Conflict (also called opposition) can be internal, external, and environmental.

So, sticking with the river metaphor...

Internal Conflict in a novel comes from inside a character - in this case, the character's fear of water. Maybe he should forget the whole stupid idea and put up with life on this side of the river.
External Conflict comes from other characters whose own goals are at odds with that of the main character. Here, there aren't any other characters. But if we put his wife on the riverbank with him, begging him not to go, and we put his arch-enemy on the rock he's trying to reach, threatening to kill him if he comes any closer, we suddenly have plenty of external conflict.
Environmental Conflict in a novel is anything non-human which threatens to thwart the hero's plans. A lot of mini plots won't contain environmental conflict, but at the river there is plenty - the slippery rock, the hungry crocodiles, the water itself...

Mini Plot Step 3: The Scene Reaches a Resolution

Like I said, plotting the novel is essentially about making life as tough for your characters as you can. And in a mini plot, that usually means that they should fail to reach their goal.

The man leaps for his rock but misses and lands in the water. The river sweeps him downstream with the snapping crocs in pursuit. He grabs another rock and clambers to safety, but not without a crocodile eating his big toe.

(Remember, this whole "river" thing is just a metaphor for plotting the novel's middle. I'll be providing some more realistic examples of how mini plots work soon.)

Mini Plot Step 4: The Character Reacts Emotionally

If the man's first mini goal was to reach the first rock safely, he has clearly failed. He has ended up on a different rock entirely and lost a toe.

Not a great start!

What he does now is to react emotionally to what has just happened - breaking down in tears, screaming in agony, wishing he had never started - something like that.

Mini Plot Step 5: They Come Up With a New Goal

What happens next? The man comes up with a new plan, that's what. He is the leading character in a novel, after all, and leading men or women don't quit at the first sign of trouble.

His overall goal remains the same - to reach the far bank of the river. And although his attempt to reach his first mini goal (the first rock) has failed, his efforts have not been totally in vain. For one thing, he is beginning to learn the rules of this unfamiliar new world - namely, that rocks are slippery and crocodiles have sharp teeth.

So he takes this knowledge and uses it. He decides that swimming to the next rock will be better than trying to jump onto it. He decides that crocodiles need fighting off, so he grabs a handful of pebbles.

And off he sets, armed with a new plan designed to take him to the second rock on his long and perilous journey across the river.

A Quick Recap of Mini Plots

So far in this article on plotting the novel's middle, I have told you that the way a character sets out to achieve their overall goal is to break it down into a series of smaller, intermediate goals.

The way that you, the novel writer, actually construct this step-by-step journey they take is by using what I have called mini plots. They look like this:

The character decides to act on a goal.
They encounter conflict.
The scene reaches a resolution.
The character reacts emotionally.
They come up with a new goal.

The beauty of them is that the fifth step of one mini plot is the first step of the next - meaning it is a simple question of constructing one after another after another - all the way across the middle section of your novel.

The only other thing to say about them is that the first three steps are known as the action phase of a mini plot, and the last two steps as the reaction phase.

In the action phase, the character tries to achieve a goal in the face of conflict - internal, external and environmental - and (usually) ends up in a worse position.
In the reaction phase, they go away to lick their wounds but eventually pick themselves up and, using any knowledge they have managed to acquire, come up with a new plan of action.

The action phase of a novel's mini plot usually takes the form of a scene and the reaction phase usually takes the form of what I call an interlude.

Scenes are dramatic in nature and are characterized by plenty of talk and action. They take place in "real time" before the readers' eyes.
Interludes are characterized by narrative summary. In them, time is often skipped through briskly or perhaps left out altogether - so the events of a few hours could be condensed to a couple of paragraphs, or even to three simple words: "Four hours later..."

And so, with the bulk of the theory under our belts, it is time to look at the three steps of plotting the novel's middle in detail.

We have already dealt with the three steps in plotting the novel's beginning. They were...