6 Ways to Firm Up Your Novel’s Saggy Middle

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All through National Novel Writing Month, published authors will take the whistle, take over our official Twitter account for a week, and act as your NaNo Coach. This week’s NaNo Coach, Claire Fuller, author of Our Endless Numbered Days, shares six ways to get through the middle of your novel:

You’re probably hitting the middle point of your novel about now, and for all writers this is often where your story starts to sag. You might have an idea of the ending, or even have it all planned out, but how you’re going to get there is unclear. Here, then, are six ideas to work those saggy middles to keep them strong, toned and looking good: 

Make things even more difficult for your main characters. 

Put as many obstacles in their way as possible to stop them achieving what they want. Make them get side-tracked in a personal crisis, burn down their house, have them break a leg. In other words, up the tension.

Plot the way ahead scene by scene. 

Focus only on the scene you can see right in front of you. Don’t worry about all the others; worrying will only stop you writing. And once you’ve written that scene, think about the possible consequences to help you plot the next. 

Don’t be too concerned about the transition from one scene to the next in your first draft; this can be worked on when you edit.

Hop over the middle section and write the ending. 

Hopping over these sections is a radical action, because it hasn’t solved the problem of your saggy middle; it has only delayed sorting it out, and your ending might need to change when you do come to write it. You also need to write a lot at the beginning and the end of the novel in order to still achieve 50,000 words by the 30th of November (but remember, a book is normally 80,000 words minimum, so this should be achievable). 

The benefit? This might make clearer what needs to happen in the middle so you can go back and write it. 

Let the middle scenes be sketchier than the end and the beginning. 

Write them as notes if you like, or as a paragraph or two for each scene. But set yourself the task of writing 20 of them, when you might only need 10. That way you’ll keep your word count up, and can delete 10 and flesh out the others when you do your editing. 

Expand any subplots. 

Allow your writing to go off on a tangent in the middle of the novel and see what happens. Again this might not solve the saggy middle issue, but it will keep you writing and help you hit that magic 50K.

Add in new characters to mess things up. 

This comes back to my first point: to make life harder for your MC. Or perhaps the new characters can represent a different point of view. 

If you are going to bring in new characters with fairly major roles, make a special note for your future self to go back and introduce them earlier on in the novel, so that readers have enough time to get to know them before the end.

Whichever options you go for, don’t worry too much—remember everyone’s first drafts are always rough and scrappy, especially the central sections. Saggy middles can be firmed up when you edit. Good luck!

Claire Fuller recently had her debut novel, Our Endless Numbered Days published in the US by Tin House, in the UK by Penguin, as well as in Canada and France, and will be published in a further five countries. It is the 2015 winner of the Desmond Elliott prize for debut fiction and has been nominated for the Edinburgh First Book Award. Claire lives in Winchester, England with her husband and children.

Nov. 20 2015
#nanowrimo #amwriting #writing #nano coach #by nano guest #claire fuller
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