The Middle Chapters

Anyone can write an attention-grabbing beginning.

See?

All it takes is a powerful statement, an intriguing premise, a vivid scene, a fascinating character, a tantalizing promise of what is to come.

      Beginnings are the easiest part of storytelling—difficult only in the decision of which moment to begin with, finding the ideal door to enter the story.

      Finding the ideal point of entry often depends on knowing where the story ends. Endings present more of a challenge. They’re like a delicate recipe where the ingredients must be measured to the precise ounce to leave just the right taste in the mouth. But it can be a very rewarding challenge, because everyone knows and appreciates a well-crafted ending, though favorite flavors may differ.

Then there’s the middle. People tend to remember beginnings and endings most clearly, but what comes between is the backbone of the story. If the beginning is the appetizer, and the ending is dessert, then the middle is the meal.

       A strong middle flows naturally from the beginning, heads inexorably toward the ending, and along the way all the story’s promises are fulfilled.

       As a novelist, I dread the plague of the “sagging middle”. It began afflicting my current work-in-progress about chapter six or so. The middle chapters are where I’m in the most danger of losing the point of it all. Or, I may discover I never knew the point in the first place, and must laboriously rework the story to find it, as happened in the earlier drafts. In a dense, multi-layered story like I’m currently writing, with half a dozen important characters with simultaneous, intertwined plot-lines unfolding in different locations, it’s easy to get lost. Each chapter has a little beginning and ending of its own, with a little middle that needs to be kept lean but filling. It’s easy to scribble the time away perfecting these parts and forgetting the whole they make.

I could just keep going on about this. Did I mention middles are hard? The point is: you’ve got to know what the point is.

       This applies in the out-here world as much as in the pages of a novel. I’m currently in the middle chapters of my life, agonizing over the little beginnings that haven’t come yet, mistaking interludes for postludes, and whining for the endings I think I’d rather have.

       When I’m writing in the middle, sometimes I have to look ahead to the ending, just soaking it in, and reminding myself that this is what I’m heading toward.

        And when I’m lost in a middle chapter of life, confused and overwhelmed by all the directions I could go, I need to reach for the Book that starts, “In the beginning, God…” and ends with “Amen.” The Book reminds me the story I’m in isn’t about me. I’m a simultaneous, intertwined chapter in the epic of all Creation, and I and everyone who knows and loves the Storyteller are headed for an utterly delicious ending that never ends.

Like lines converging on the heart of the horizon, may every descriptive phrase and line of dialogue converge on the final page, and may my words and actions converge on the Way, the Truth, and the Life.