Halfway There · 6:08am May 23rd, 2019
In a typical three act plot structure, the second is incredibly important—and incredibly difficult to handle.
When it comes to film, the second act comprises roughly half of the story. It's essentially the meat of the sandwich. Books don't follow this "25/50/25" formula nearly as strictly, but it's how I've proportioned mine in the outlining phase. However, I do feel the second act of long-form stories, be them books or stories on this site, is very difficult for writers to pull off. Ever since I've heard of the concept, I've tried my utmost to avoid it in any multi-part story I've written.
Often, you'll have the "big idea," which usually means a kick-ass beginning and/or ending. The issue here is that writers almost never, in my experience, have their "big idea" pertain to the middle of the story. This can often lead to "mid-novel doldrums," where you've lost the head of steam from your idea being new and shiny, but you're also too far from the ending for your second wind to kick in.
As you might've guessed from the title of the blog post, today I officially hit the halfway mark of my big project, whose working title is Saga of the Great Winter. Although I don't use chapters anymore, my outline is still in chapter format. It consists of 52 chapters, plus a prologue and epilogue, and I just finished "chapter 25," which happens to be the 13th of 26 chapters planned for act two. Currently, I'm at just over 177,000 words of first draft material, so the ending word count will likely be in the 350,000-400,000 word range, assuming something doesn't blow up in the third act.
What makes me really excited about all this is I think I've really managed to dodge the aforementioned doldrums quite well. The story has nine(!) concurrent points of view, one just reached a very important milestone in its arc, and a few more are close on the horizon. A couple are also in the cliffhanger stage, and there's a very huge moment that's a few chapters away that I'm super-stoked to write.
Sorry for the ramble. I just figured those interested in this project of mine might appreciate an update now that I've got something worthwhile to report. It turns out making more detailed beat sheets from the 1-3 sentences of outline for a scene are very helpful, along with 2-3 hours of more focused writing a day instead of trying to hit a vague word count goal.
I write almost exclusively short stories since I’m lazy and writing is hard, so it’s always interesting to get a glimpse into the world of longform writers.
Good luck!
Wow, that's ambitious. Does lack of chapters give you more flexibility in breaking it up into volumes? How many volumes are you planning to break it into for publishing?
I think the whole three act structure is actually a lot more difficult to pull off when it comes to discovery writers like myself, or at least it's difficult for me. I'm too worried about what's going on with the story chapter by chapter to see the bigger picture, and sometimes it ends up hurting more than helping, but not always.
I think the easiest way to follow that three act structure for a writer is to follow the hero's journey formula, but then again that doesn't really work if you're not writing that kind of story. I'm sure there's other templates for other types of stories out there, but I'll be damned if I know what they are.
Big mood, as the kids supposedly say.
I'm dragging myself kicking and screaming into longform writing and it is a painful process. I hit mid-novel slump every time because I honestly get my inspiration from the climax, then start to write towards that, then fizzle and have to fight to get myself back on track.
So, yeah. Color me jealous.
There's a writing tech book by James Scott Bell called Write Your Novel From The Middle that makes a good case and touches a bunch on what you say here. Need to give it another read-through.
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Funnily enough, I don't consider myself a good short story writer at all. You have to accomplish so much in such a small space, and I find coming up with a concept that'll fit in a couple thousand words quite difficult. Writing long form is also pretty taxing.
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Well, assuming anyone actually wants a print version of this story, I'm thinking it'll probably require two volumes. I was recently advised that it's difficult to print something longer than a quarter million words as one book. Originally, I never had the thought of volumes in mind, but there is a very big event that happens in chapter 31 of the outline. It won't quite split the story into perfect halves, but it should be fairly close.
The real reason I abandoned chapters is because they stopped making sense after about 14 of them. It became harder and harder to group a few points of view together and for them to be related enough to count as a chapter. More and more, I was basically just arbitrarily batching the story off in 10k word chunks and calling them chapters. So, thinking about it, the change in structural formatting doesn't change how you'd potentially split. An alternate way to split it is into quarters (act 1, 1/2 act 2, 2/2 act 2, act 3). This is how the story's broken up now:
i.imgur.com/1gqlrKC.png
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Knew that was getting linked.
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Part of it with this outline is luck, I think. I was able to get a few of the story arcs to big moments at around the halfway point of the book, and because I have so many POVs on the go at once, I could space them out in such a way that I cascaded these big moments at the halfway mark. I dunno, part of it was it just came together, but I guess another part was my instinct of "something big needs to happen here" influenced me as I was writing the story's beat sheet. I ended up placing three major battles in the span of seven chapters, and all of them are very different in terms of locale, tone, and events. Hell, the one that's probably the least realistic is the one actually taken from Roman Empire history.
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I actually started with discovery writing. Going in, I had no plan, no outline, nothing. I just had a big event that didn't even happen in the fic itself (the antagonist's origin), so I knew exactly what drives him and why he's doing what he's doing. From there, I just wrote stuff and didn't really think too far ahead. I definitely do have some hero's journey stuff, but the story has a lot of POVs, a tremendous amount of canon characters, and over 50 OCs, counting "bit parts." I also knew how the first act was going to end pretty much right away, so I had something tangible to work toward.
But after that, I had so much going on at once, it was impossible for me to keep it all straight in my head, so I was forced to spend a few days outlining. I needed to figure out all of the arcs, and ideally, consolidate the story a good amount at the end of the second act. A few arcs/POVs need to end or come together by then, so the story's focus is a lot more narrow in the third act, so there's the sense of momentum for it reaching the conclusion. I guess think of the story as an elongated diamond, whose tips are the prologue/epilogue, and I'm nearing the story's widest point.
In all, the story's a lot more ambitious than I'd planned, by quite a lot. I just found adding all these layers of complexity was necessary. If all these characters are travelling to X/Y/Z to seek help for Equestria in its darkest hour, those journeys shouldn't be done back to front in just a couple of long scenes. I wanted them to be different, with the journeys having different feelings, beats, and points of tension, as well as the issues the characters run into when they actually reach their destination. One thing I had to address is figuring out where all these arcs needed to end up by the act 2-3 transition and to plot them in such a way that they all reached those points properly.
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As one of the kids, I can confirm we do indeed say that.
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I remember briefly talking to Somber (Author of Project Horizons) at a con and he basically said the same thing.
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Ah, that's interesting. Luckily, this story's only going to be just over 1/3 of the length of that story instead of upwards of a million words.