Being a Better Writer: Avoiding a Sagging Middle

All right! And we’re back with today’s follow-up to one of our more recent posts! Remember? The one about health?

Okay, I’m actually joking. This isn’t a post about that. But it was too good an opportunity a joke to pass up. Sagging middle … anyway …

No, today is another topic by request, but it’s not about that sagging gut. Well, it’s not about the sag you were just thinking of, but the one you probably thought of when you first saw the title to this BaBW post. You know, the one that you’re worried about finding in the middle of your story.

Yes, that middle.

So, let’s dive right in. We’ll do that by first asking this question for those who may not have heard the term: what is a sagging middle?

You can read the rest of this post at Unusual Things

Comments

[AlouetteSK]

Good article.
It is definitely a challenge I see writers have to deal with in anime adaptations a lot of times. Many shows do not have enough meat to flesh out because it was outpacing the manga, but in order to have syndication, they needed 24(?) episodes. So a lot of times they fill it with padding. Depending on the mangaka, sometimes a whole lot of padding.

So what would the chart look like in an M. Night Shyamalan flick that memetically has a lot of twists? And what would a story that gets taken over by a romantic plot tumor look like?

[Viking ZX]

It is definitely a challenge I see writers have to deal with in anime adaptations a lot of times. Many shows do not have enough meat to flesh out because it was outpacing the manga, but in order to have syndication, they needed 24(?) episodes. So a lot of times they fill it with padding. Depending on the mangaka, sometimes a whole lot of padding.

Oh, filler episodes.

I don't miss them.

So what would the chart look like in an M. Night Shyamalan flick that memetically has a lot of twists?

Not too different, actually. It'd just have a bunch of smaller, spiky twists here and there. A twist usually is a sharp increase in tension for the reader, since it causes them to rethink a level of information from the story and see everything in a new light. So a series of rapid twists would be a very spiky tension spike, even if only for a moment (the "height" of the spike probably being determined by how influential a twist it is).

And what would a story that gets taken over by a romantic plot tumor look like?

A romantic plot tumor is really just another name for a super poorly done romantic subplot that is jammed in without regards for the rest of the story, so it wouldn't look any different than dropping another story inside a drop of the first, but done poorly.