Article: The middle book in any...

The middle book in any series is difficult to write. Not only is there the tension of an overarching plot arc to keep going, but there's also the problem of putting together a beginning, middle, and end in a book that has to serve the purpose of a "middle" as well. It's so hard to avoid the midseries slump.

You have to cheat.

What, you thought I'd advocate taking the long way 'round? Dream on, buttercup. In so much of writing, you have to find the "cheats" that work for you. And you should. The cheats are part of your voice, that unique thing that makes your art your own. Plus, you can't afford to agonize endlessly over a middle book. There's places to go, other books to write, and kids to feed. Sharks can't stop swimming or they'll drown—I can't dither in the middle of a series or I will.

I was lucky, in that when I came to Devil's Right Hand, I knew exactly what had to happen. I didn't know how it would happen, but I knew what the characters wanted. I had a laundry list of plot arcs to set up for the fourth and fifth books. And technically, I suppose the Valentine series is really two, two, two series in one—Working For The Devil and Dead Man Rising are very much a duology, an overture and first act. The real meat of the series is the last three books, which are constructed like a trilogy—but a trilogy built on the preceding work in the first two books. It's a crazy inverted pyramid of plot.

So, because I had no frocking clue how to write the third book in a five-book series, I cheated. I treated it like the first book in a trilogy, something I'm very comfortable with—almost too comfortable.

The most useful advice I ever received about plotting actually came in a high-school discussion of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, one of my favorite books. When one boils it down, Miss Young the English teacher told us, each story is the same. We begin with a situation at rest. Something happens to impair or imbalance that equilibrium, and the story rises in a slope through the consequences of that imbalancing act. The crisis occurs, and afterward there is a new equilibrium restored, and the story ends.

There it is. Every story, if it deserves the name, follows this pattern. Somebody should give that teacher a medal. Stories that violate this pattern leave us feeling unsatisfied, and can't really be called "stories." Even a vignette follows this pattern, even a fairy tale or a myth. And certainly a series does, just on a bigger scale.

Once you know how it works, it becomes almost ridiculously easy to see the different parts of this engine working smoothly, and writing a series becomes. . .well, not exactly easy, but definitely not insurmountably difficult. It's like having really clear simple directions for putting together a piece of furniture. It's the difference between getting your bookcase built in under an hour, or wasting fifty bucks on a pile of parts and needing blood-pressure medication.

There are two types of book series: interconnected and what I call "jigsaw" series. Some series—like Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden or Kim Harrison's Rachel Morgan—repeat a character's microcosm with each book, like jigsaw puzzle pieces, and are open-ended. Interconnected series have a very definite ending in mind. The big trick in an interconnected series is to keep upping the ante, because you're working for the crisis which restores equilibrium after it's been out of whack for several books. Both are tremendously difficult hat tricks to pull off, but oh, the rewards of each are sweet.

Of course I am looking back at this from actually having finished the series. Seeing and thinking about the structure of a such a thing is easy if you're finished with it, and not nearly so easy when you're in the middle, trying to meet deadlines and keep from going utterly insane. I suppose humans structure stories the way they do because life, theoretically, is like a narrative: your equilibrium is constantly being whacked into imbalance, and you have to adjust. It's like riding a bicycle on a cosmic philosophical scale.

Unfortunately, there are no cheats for life. Which is, I suppose, why we write stories and tales and myths. . .

. . .but that's another essay, for another time.

Copyright © 2007 by Lilith Saintcrow