If anyone were to take at point blank value what I'm about to say, they’d be wrong. In the first place, taking things at point blank can be dangerous, especially when explosives are involved. And second it shows a distinct lack of objectivity in evaluating the information you receive before you believe it, meaning you are a sheep. Don’t be a sheep; this is all opinion so you can make up your own damn mind about it.
The middle is perhaps the most varied and confusing part of your story. Or, at least when it comes to writing a blog about it. There are a lot of aspects, I may miss some but it’s gonna be good fun talking about it anyway so here goes.
Basically this is where you tell the story. There are a lot of tools you use like foreshadowing* and plot twists**, but not a lot of that interests me, I’m interested in telling a story. So that’s what I look for when I get information about writing this middle part.
There isn’t much change in the basic rule I enumerated in the last post, make it interesting and understandable. Of course, that’s not all there is to it, why would it be? That's boring, and I assure you this business of writing is never boring.
During the middle, you have the fun task of introducing and developing each of your characters. Now that is fun. See, you don’t always get the opportunity to see through the eyes of each character, but you still create that character by what the others see, there’s a whole lot of fun you and your readers can have with this. Of course, there's nothing that says you have to do the whole story from one perspective, it's your story so you make the rules.
Another thing you create is the plot. You advance the story by having the characters do certain things, showing the others reacting to this, having each with his own motivations that explain why he does the things he does, usually there’s some battle of good and evil on some level, that’s fun, and you can have lots of plot twists, unexpected things happening, that’s all good (did I mention I'm very interested in plot twists?). You can do whatever you damn please as long as it advances the story.
I like to tell my stories in unconventional ways. Showing things from different viewpoints is a good way of doing this. In the entire series of Sherlock Holmes, you never see the story told through Holme's viewpoint, yet he is the main character. Well it wouldn’t be any fun if you knew what the amazing Sherlock was thinking as he was thinking it, you have to wait and see how he has figured out everything at the end.
Ender’s Game and Ender’s Shadow are essentially the same story, but told through two sets of eyes, Ender’s and Bean’s. It makes for very good reading.
So, my stories have a lot of different viewpoints to play around with. Another thing is: I really like Time-Traveling stories. I’ll probably do a whole series. But here's the trick: all of the stories are going to be connected, they will exist in the same universe and interact with each other. So it’s like one big story! Good fun is on the way, I assure you.
You can tell stories out of order, you can make the bad guy the main character your story is told through. For the most part the series Mission Earth is told this way, through the eyes of the assassin and saboteur, Soltan Gris, sent to stop Mission Earth and our real hero, Jettero Heller. (By the way, in case you were wondering you should definitely read all the books I just mentioned here.) So you can do all kinds of different stuff to convey your story.
Way, way back in the first of this little series, I said you need an overall idea, a moral of sorts or a concept you’re trying to convey to your audience. If a story does nothing else, it does this. Through the actions of the characters, their ideas, the situations they get themselves in and the outcome of those situations, you do this. If nothing else, that is what you are trying to do. So this middle is the place to do it, and at the end too, but hey, we're not on that post yet!
You know, I’m not going to make this a long post. I am essentially going to talk about the middle and the overall writing process throughout the remainder of this blog, so trying to put 500 posts into one is not something I’m keen on doing. Besides, it is your story.
CME
Note: Unexpectedly, it turns out I’m really an antagonistic pacifist who goes about murdering imaginary people. And then interestingly enough, it turns out I’m really that guy's twin brother, forced to live in his attic and write his blog posts. Kind of puts all this in a certain perspective, huh?
*http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/foreshadowing
**http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plot_twist
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