We all know that stories have a beginning, a middle and an end, but as writers, it can be surprisingly easy to skimp on one or all of these sections. Here are some ways that writers learning how to write a novel can ensure they start strong, maintain tension throughout the middle and finish with a flourish:
Engage readers from the start
The beginning of a novel has several jobs to do. First, it needs to get the reader’s attention and make them want to purchase the book and keep reading it. Secondly, it needs to establish the world in which the story takes place. It also needs to establish who the main characters are. The inciting incident that sets the main action of the novel in motion should also be at the beginning.
This is a lot of ground to cover in just a few chapters. Furthermore, there are a number of mistakes to watch out for. Writer Natasha Lester covers some of these common errors in her blog post about beginnings. Many of the items on Lester’s ‘don’t’ list consist of passages that slow down the narrative. The beginning of the novel is not the place for things like flashbacks, back story or dream sequences.
However, in trying to engage the reader with the opening of your novel, you should be aware of another common trap that some writers fall into. Engaging the reader does not necessarily begin with explosive action. In fact, this can leave a reader cold. The problem is that action without emotional engagement is unlikely to make readers care.
What does make readers care is characters with interesting dialogue, an opening that raises questions or an unusual setting or situation. You may have to revise the beginning more than any other part of your novel. This is one reason why writers are encouraged to resist the temptation to keep rewriting the beginning rather than moving on with the novel. There will be plenty of time to revise your novel as much as needed, but before that can be done, it needs to be finished first. That means moving on to the middle:
How to write a novel: Avoiding the muddled middle
As Lemony Snicket, the alter-ego of writer Daniel Handler, points out, the middle is where very little good happens to the characters, or at least it should be. The reason for that is that if the characters are happy, the story lacks conflict, and a story without conflict is not very interesting to read. But writers fall into the trap of writing a messy, poorly constructed middle for a number of other reasons too.
Ideally, the middle is the meat of the story, and it is where almost all of the important events of the novel happen. It comprises at least 50 percent of the novel if not more. However, it is also the place where writers tend to lose their momentum or where a novel with a promising beginning falters. The middle of the book is where many novels lose their narrative drive.
One reason for this loss of narrative drive is structural. Writers who successfully write without outlining, often called pantsers, still have an innate sense of structure. The difference in how they write middles that work and how planners write middles that work is that pantsers are able to do what the planners do but more instinctively. Problems arise for planners when they do not develop an effective structure in their outline. Problems arise for pantsers when they have not developed an intuitive sense of good structure. Both types of writers can find themselves floundering in the middle of a novel. It is common for both types of writers to have a better sense of direction for a novel’s beginning and end than its middle.
Too often, the middle of the novel meanders with a series of events that are not tied up closely enough with the novel’s inciting incident and climax. One thing you should ask yourself during the planning stage (or if in a mid-novel crisis) is whether the events in the middle follow from one to another believably and (particularly in the case of thrillers and other tension-dependent genres) increase the tension by raising the stakes. The middle of the novel benefits from featuring a series of cause and effect incidents that leave readers curious about how each development pans out.
This does not mean that your novel can’t have subplots and secondary characters, but those subplots should be tied in to the main thread of the novel. Another common middle-of-the-book error is introducing too many characters and subplots to bulk out the middle when they lack connection. Instead, subplots should increase complications and raise the tension rather than diffusing it. Their resolution might even further complicate preceding unresolved elements.
Along with a sagging structure and plot that loses momentum, watch out for characters who become less active. Characters who are passive or who ramble slow down the pace.
You might be tempted to save up flashbacks and back story that you did not include in the beginning for the middle of the book. However, even though this is a better place for them, it is important to make sure they don’t take over the middle. The motion of the book should still be forward. Information that is not part of the present should be introduced sparingly.
One tricky aspect of the middle for both pantsers and planners is that some degree of experimentation can lead to dividends. Sometimes, allowing a character to ramble or following a seemingly unrelated subplot can result in a great creative epiphany. The novel may take on a richness it did not otherwise have or go in an unanticipated but welcome direction. Therefore, the lesson to take away is not that the middle should be rigidly controlled. Rather, it is that when you feel your middle has lost the way of your story, you can go back to original conflicts and the main storyline to get your novel back on track. Furthermore, the middle can and usually should be considerably tightened up during revision.
Digressing in the middle can actually be another way to improve the middle section of the book. They may reveal subtext that you were previously unaware of, and that subtext can inform many aspects of your novel including the subplots, the way characters behave and the situations that drive tension. Few readers will care to read a character’s five-page rambling in the middle of a thriller novel about their relationship with their mother, but a writer who has accidentally wandered down this path might realise that this troubled relationship is mirrored in other relationships throughout the novel and that it adds conflict to those relationships. A five-page ramble might be condensed to a sentence or two and information peppered throughout the book to complete this picture.
As the middle section draws to a close, all the threads begin to come together for the final part of the book:
Creating the sense of an ending
We have all had the experience of reading an engaging book or watching an intriguing film only to find that the final pages or minutes are letdowns. A novel with a perfectly constructed beginning and middle can be ruined by the ending.
An ending usually though not always resolves the plot and all the loose ends of the novel. If the novel is part of a series, many things might be left unresolved. In fact, a book in a series should leave some things unresolved to make the reader want to read the next installment. In other cases, novelists may make the choice to leave aspects of the novel unresolved. One of the boldest examples of a novel that does this is Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend. Tartt leaves the answer to the main mystery of the story ambiguous; while providing sufficient information to surmise who is responsible, she never confirms it for the reader. Some readers who made it to the end of this very long novel only to discover that the murderer is never actually revealed reacted with frustration while others felt that Tartt had successfully brought a measure of uncertainty that is common in life but rare in fiction to her novel. However, writers should be aware that they run a risk when they subvert reader expectations in this way.
Furthermore, in a straight genre novel, such a subversion is even more unlikely to work. Tartt’s novel was first and foremost literary fiction. The resolution of the murder that haunts the book throughout is not necessarily the main point of the book, but had it been a work of genre mystery fiction, the ending may have felt more like a cheat.
In addition to failing to wrap up the important plot points, one of the greatest errors a writer can make with the ending is resolving the story by introducing new information or through a deus ex machina. Anything that is key in resolving the story must be introduced earlier in the story, and a story cannot be resolved by suddenly having some miraculous occurrence or device come out of nowhere and wrap things up. This is the case even if the occurrence or device is not in and of itself fantastical and impossible. For example, if a gun is trained on the protagonist and suddenly the antagonist is thrown off his feet and the protagonist escapes due to an earthquake, the reader is likely to find the ending a little too incredible. While certainly such a thing could happen in real life, it is very unlikely.
What may happen in real life is not always satisfying in fiction. Furthermore, readers tend to want endings that arise out of the characters’ development and what has come before. By the end of a novel, the main character should also have undergone a change. However, another potential pitfall is an ending that goes on too long. This change should be shown but not belaboured, and the book itself should end shortly after the resolution of the climax.
Ending your novel: ‘Show, don’t tell’
‘Show, don’t tell’ is advice that definitely applies to the ending. The reader does not want a dry rundown of how each conflict was resolved as though the end of the novel is a documentary with title cards informing the viewer what became of each character. If you look at visual representations of how action should rise and fall throughout the course of a novel, you will see it rising to a fever pitch at the climax and then dropping off sharply as the novel ends soon after that climax.
To learn how to write a novel, writers need to develop a good grasp on structure in order to maintain narrative drive through the whole story. Writing each section of a novel has its own unique challenges. The ending must be strong enough to get the reader’s attention, the middle must keep the reader engaged for possibly hundreds of pages and the end must satisfy by resolving the plot and showing character change.
Do you want to start structuring the sections of your novel? Then go here to start using the helpful Now Novel Story Builder.
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