We tend to think of our stories as:

YEAH MAN WOOO BOOM INCITING INCIDENT AS THE TALE BEGINS.

And then:

YEEHAW FUCK YEAH IT’S THE END IT’S AN EVEN BIGGER BOOM AND ALSO A KABLAMMO AND THEN KSSHAOW AND FRRRBZZZT AND AHHH, NGGGGH SWEET CLIMAX.

We have these two moments — dramatic beginning and epic ending — and in the middle is…

What?

Often, we treat it like it’s a sagging clothesline. Dipping down in the middle with the weight of all that hangs upon it — supposedly clean clothes dragging in the dirt.

No. Fuck that shit, George. You must revise how you think of your story’s middle. It needn’t be some untended swamp, fetid and formless, in which your story will become mired.

Instead, think of it as:

The midpoint.

The middle of your story is not a straight line going up, down, or on a level plane. The middle of your story is a thing with shape. It has peaks and valleys all its own. It is not a two-dimensional line, but rather, it swoops and turns and loops like a roller coaster. (Bonus read: an older post talking about narrative architecture and the shape of story.) The midpoint has topography, man. It is not an invitation to let the story go lazy and loose but rather to keep it moving, up and down, left and right, through conflict and drama.

Here, then, are some quick tips to keep the middle of your book zipping and clipping along:

1. Do what Delilah says. (I had a similar point here, but it was wordier and more profane. Go read hers, which is as taut as the rubber band you wear on your braces. In fact, most times you can probably just go listen to her say stuff instead of whatever dumbness of mine.)

2. You know that thing in your book where you’re about to dwell over-long in one of the valleys? You’ve got all this plot-flavored stuff to explain and all these transitions to go through and the journey from Point A to Point Z feels long, so long? Skip it. Consider this a narrative exercise — leap the valley and jump right to the next peak. Meaning, get to the next cool part, and summarize — swiftly, now! — how the story got there.

3. Don’t shy away from the slow parts where you breathe some oxygen into the story, though. You need a little oxygen, if only because it’s flammable and you might need it to blow up the room later. A slow spot is okay — but even the slow spots need to be relevant and revelatory. Or at the bare minimum: interesting. Always. Be. Interesting.

4. Drama is conflict that is character-driven. Seize it. Characters lie, cheat and steal. They swindle and betray. They love when they shouldn’t and let hate take them over. They have affairs. They have lapses in judgment — some tiny, some huge, all consequential to the tale. They want, they need, they desire. They have problems. Exploit all of this. (Note that exploiting it too much leads to melodrama, not drama — though in certain story modes, melodrama can work, too.) The middle of your story is fertile for this kind of character shenanigans.

5. Rhythm is created when you alternate things. This is true in writing even a single paragraph — you write a long sentence here, a short one, a short one, a medium-sized one, etc. Then a short paragraph or series of dialogue bits with another big paragraph. This is true too in the shape of the story — a big chapter next to a small one, a slow moment followed by a fast one, a bit of character introspection that leads into an action scene. The middle sometimes falls prey to a gross uniformity, which leads to a loss of rhythm. Do not let the middle be monotone. Look at the shape of music. Then listen to it — listen to how music handles its center. Ape that.

6. The midpoint is a knife stuck suddenly in the center of a dinner table — thwack! It is a dramatic breach — there, at each end of the table are the beginning and the climax. Two guests dining. Between which is a fucking knife stabbed into the hard wood. Why is it there? Examine the knife. Exploit it. Find the knife in your narrative. What is the blade stuck in the middle? What does it say? What conflict emblemizes it? Seize that edge.

7. The thing you think is the actual end of your book? Bring it to the midpoint. Sounds extreme, but try it — drag it forward and plant it smack in the middle. Now the latter half of the book is unclaimed and unknown territory. It is unimagined by both you and the reader. Who knows what lurks there? HERE THERE BE ENDER DRAGONS.

8. The midpoint is not just a knife — it’s a catapult. What I mean is this: an event will take the characters and launch them into the next half of the story. The event must propel them — it must give them dramatic urgency, it must fling them forward. The stakes are upped or changed. The plan is ruined. All seems lost, or a victory that was won is now false. The word “change” is key, here. A change of state is significant — something has shifted, and now the playing field is different. Maybe the whole goddamn game is different.

9. Behold and correct passivity. I make a lot of noise where characters have to be active over passive, but there is a middle-ground here where a character is reactive. Meaning, the story presents them with a problem external to them and they are forced to react accordingly. Still, though, at a certain point the character has become active over reactive — not necessarily “gaining the upper-hand,” but gaining agency. The midpoint is an excellent time for exactly this. It represents just the sort of turning point readers seek in the middle of the story.

10. Throw out the rules. Not necessarily the internal story rules (which may be unseen but should remain consistent) — but your overall plan for them. Got an outline? Now’s a good time to scrap it. Writing is often an act of constantly checking your gut. I can feel when I think the story is starting to go boggy — I trust my instinct and I act on that. When that happens, I search for a way to break things I did not expect to break. I jump out of the plane with no parachute acquired. I find a character to kill, a thing to blow up, a relationship to begin or detonate — I reach out blindly for the toys in my sandbox to see what I can do to smash them together, change their story and modify the action. Fuck my plan. Screw my outline. The only thing that matters is whether or not the story is working right there on the page. Midpoint is a great check-in time for this. When in doubt? Improvise, escalate, and ‘asplode stuff. *hits big red comical button*

Ta-da! Ten tips. Use ’em or lose ’em.

Now go write more stuff.

Reminder:

30 DAYS IN THE WORD MINES is a 30-day writing regimen. $2.99 at Amazon, or 33% off directly if you use coupon code NANOWRIMO.

The NaNoWriMo Storybundle is live — 13 books with another 12 if you meet the $25 threshold. You will note that the bonus tier contains one of my books so go grabby-grabby.

Finally, if you want a lot of my tips and tricks and DUBIOUS WORDTHINK agglomerated, look no further than The Kick-Ass Writer, out now from Writer’s Digest: Indiebound or Amazon.

Imagine that Person A has a sandwich.

He says to me, “Damn, this sandwich is delicious. Best sandwich I have ever eaten.” He describes its ingredients in detail: a bounty of meats and cheese and rare mustards, mm-mm-mm.  Then he says, “We should all share this sandwich.” And you think, dang, that’s very nice of him.

So, you take a quarter of the sandwich for yourself and then you pass the rest along. Maybe you’re hungry, so you take a bite. Or maybe you decide to wait for later and let someone else eat it.

If only you have peeled back the bread and looked inside because it’s just — I mean, it’s just full of scat. Turtle turdlets and otter dung and the sloppy mess from an irritable gopher.

Don’t worry, nobody really fed you a shit-filled sammy.

But also, definitely worry, because the truth is much worse.

Truth is, the internet’s informational sharing mechanism is pretty much that. It’s a lot of people passing shit sandwiches around, ignorant of or pretending they’re not actually shit sandwiches.

Given the horror show present in places around the globe recently — Beirut, Paris, and so forth — the informational sharing mechanism has been like ordure fertilizing a garden of only ordure. During times of crisis and concern, the misinformation shared often seems to spike sharply for reasons both sinister and foolish. Some folks want to actively share propaganda, and other people who spread the propaganda around because it sounds awfully good and awfully true and so surely it’s not propaganda at all (spoiler warning: it is). The most sinister of propaganda is the stuff that doesn’t read like propaganda at all. It sounds sensible. It comes from smart-sounding folks. Maybe it even comes from a primary major media source. Or! Maybe it comes from a friend. And we trust friends. Above all others. The circle of trust amongst people can be tighter and stronger than any other bond, and we like to think it keeps out bad ideas but sometimes it does the opposite — it traps the bad stuff within where we all huff it like glue.

This is easily solved, at least on the Internet.

It’s called “just fucking Google it.”

You know the paranoid phrase IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING?

Add a new one to your panoply of phrases:

BEFORE YOU FUCKING SHARE IT, JUST FUCKING GOOGLE IT.

Because usually, the order of operations goes like this:

a) see a thing

b) maybe read it all the way through or maybe just enjoy the insightful headline

c) SHARE IT LIKE SYPHILIS

Here, I would add a mere extra step:

a) see a thing

b) maybe read it all the way through or maybe just enjoy the insightful headline

c) FUCKING GOOGLE IT

d) determine whether or not you should share this thing or not

The impetus behind me asking for a slight shift in your Internet information-sharing habits is this: on Facebook, that most fertile breeding ground of dum-dummery, someone I was “friends” (air quotes are key) with shared a post from some ministry that was also so “patriotic” I’m pretty sure the writer ejaculates every time he sees an American flag. This post was all about how HEY GUESS WHAT JAPAN NEVER HAD ANY MUSLIM TERROR ATTACKS BECAUSE JAPAN KEEPS THEM MUSLIMS OUT, and then it goes on — sounding very factual and intellectual and actually not at all like my frothy caps-lock tone suggests! — to lay out its case with facts and details. Japan doesn’t allow Muslims into the country, Japan doesn’t allow the study of Islam, and only a “few hundred” Muslims even live in the country. I mean wow. Who knew?

So very simple and straightforward, right? Japan is safe because Japan closed its doors to Islam.

Full stop. End of story. Huzzah and hooray.

Now, let’s for a moment try to see past the sheer irony of someone like this using Japan as an example — I say ironic because I’m guessing that this dipshit would normally froth at the mouth if he even heard the words “Pearl” and “Harbor” in the same sentence. Further, let’s also look past the fact that even if it were all true, that doesn’t make it right, and it doesn’t make it simple…

It’s all bullshit.

Which is easily discovered through the strategy of —

Wait for it.

Waaaaaaait for it.

JUST FUCKING GOOGLE IT.

All you gotta do is take like, less than two minutes of your life and Google it. Hell, Google already had this one locked and loaded in the chamber, as it auto-filled the search term for me. It’s not only bullshit, it’s old bullshit — years-old from one of those chain letter e-mails you probably got from your racist grandpa. And it takes a shallow dive to see the author of the piece is a one of two authors who co-wrote this lunatic e-book about immigration (spoiler warning: its cover offers a big red clumsy font and an image of the burning World Trade towers) and whose entire presence on the Internet is a racist sham. (I’m not linking to any of this because, really, ugh.) And of course statistically, the 1.6 billion Muslims globally could not possibly be related to the fractional number of terrorists in the world, so tying one to the other is super-dubious and…

Point is, it took me no time at all in my day to suss this out. It took as much effort as it takes to clean a filthy window so that you can see through it more clearly.

It’s not your fault. Our brains are poorly wired. You know how like, Dell computers come pre-loaded with lots of junk-ware? Our brains come loaded with a lot of the same crummy software. Fallacies and fritzing logic centers and synaptic tangles that let us trust anecdotal information over statistical reality. Surely once upon a time this bloatware probably helped us defend ourselves from baboon attacks or something, but those days are gone, and now as we sit plump and happy anxious in our office chairs, we have to defeat our fucky reptilian brains and cleave to some kind of logic. Particularly when sharing information — because information creates for us a story, and story is important. Narrative matters. That’s why propaganda exists.

Here someone will probably say, WELL IT HAPPENS ON BOTH SIDES, and sure, yeah, yes, it does. And I’ve done the thing too where you share something and then learn fairly quickly that it’s old, outdated, or just plain wrong-o. Thing is, the power of JUST FUCKING GOOGLE IT is that it will limit the bullshit on all sides of a thing. It’s not perfect, no. It will not grant you 20/20 vision — certainly you have to possess reason and common sense, and further, Google is capable of floating bullshit to the top of the pond, too. And sometimes it’s not as easy as taking just a minute or two of your time. Sometimes it takes some actual reading! (gasp.) Just the same, in my experience it’s still a very good start. God knows, you might even learn something in the process.

So, repeat after me:

BEFORE YOU FUCKING SHARE IT, JUST FUCKING GOOGLE IT.

Truth will out. And, hopefully, Google will out, too.

(Small call to action, here: if you are capable of donating to charity, please consider doing so. Charity Navigator will rate charities for you and show you vital statistics of each charity, and so you might want to look at Doctors Without Borders, or the American Refugee Committee.)

We are just over the midpoint hump in NaNoWriMo — so it’s time to check in, see how you’re doing. I’ll have a post later about dealing with the midpoint of your book, but in the meantime, how has it been for you? How is the book? How and what is your process? If this is your first time doing NaNoWriMo, how do you find it?

I’m unofficially participating, as I do with many months — I’m presently just over 41,000 words, though that’ll slow down because I travel this week and because next week is the TURKEY PARADE that is Thanksgiving. I am dubious that my 41,000 words are worth a single good goddamn, but that’s the burden most writers bear regarding their own work. Show me an author who is uniformly pleased with everything she writes all the time and I will show you an ANDROID WHO MUST BE UNMASKED BEFORE IT MURDERS ALL OF HUMANITY.

So, status updates — let’s hear them.

Man, I didn’t do a flash fiction challenge last week, did I?

I AM DOPEY MCGEE.

Anyway, this week, let’s make it easy. Go to your favorite music playing app or device, spin up a random song either of your own or from a service like Pandora.

The title of the song is now also the title of your story.

And you should listen to the song and take from it inspiration to tell the tale.

You’ve got 1000 words.

Post at your online space.

Link back here in the comments so we can all read it.

Due by next week — Friday the 20th, noon EST.

Some quick newsy bits of note:

First up, readers have written-in Star Wars: Aftermath to the Goodreads Choice Awards under the Best Sci-Fi Books of 2015 category, so thank you! That category and all the others have an overwhelmingly awesome array of books, so, y’know, go vote for some. And if you do end up voting for Aftermath, hey, thank you a whole buncha bunches.

Next: Zer0es is one of Amazon’s best books of 2015 in the sci-fi and fantasy category, putting me in truly enviable company. Thanks to Amazon, and hope you guys check the book out. (Oh, and an audio version is in the works!)

And reminder! Tomorrow night! 6:30PM, me and Adam Christopher will be at the Doylestown Bookshop. He’ll be talking Made to Kill. I’ll be talking Star Wars and Zer0es. We’ll both be talking The Shield. It’ll be awesome. BE THERE, PA/NJ/DE HUMANS.

Next Thursday is my Charlotte appearance, too.

And, uhh. THAT’S IT, I GUESS.

*flings down smoke bomb*

*coughs because of smoke*

*why do I keep buying these*

*stupid smoke*

SOME HORSES JUST WANT TO WATCH THE WORLD BURN

We’re now one year out from the election, and this particular election cycle has been going on for — *checks watch* — well, let’s just go with FOR AN INTOLERABLE AMOUNT OF TIME. And last night was the 3,912th iteration of the GOP debates, our current favorite sport, where yet again the candidates disappointingly failed to oust one another with sword and javelin.

I have occasionally seen some international friends marvel at our election process, particularly as regards the EAGLE THRONE OF LORD PRESIDENT, and I imagine they have a look on their faces like, “Wow, what the unholy hell is going on over there in America? Is everybody okay? Do they need an intervention?” Meanwhile, Canada elected Justin Trudeau, a certified hunk of smoldering manflesh who then filled his cabinet with people who are both actually capable to do their jobs but also represent surprising ethnic and gender diversity. (When asked why he did this, Trudeau said, and I’m paraphrasing, “Because it’s 2015 and because you have to ask me that question, you jabbering chimpanzee. Now behold my sexiness as I snowboard into your heart. WWHIISSH.”)

So, to those wondering what’s going on over here, I will take a moment to explain.

Presidential politics is composed of two stages:

The primary race.

And then the presidential race.

The primary race is the thousand-year stage where we’re at now, in which each party votes for its particular KINGSLAYER who will attempt to forcibly occupy the EAGLE THRONE during the next round of Presidential Idol, the race itself. This first half represents an ugly, inefficient and ultimately demeaning contest, and here’s what I mean:

To win your primary, you must “appease your base.” See, your base comprises the center mass of your political party tribe — and this can be viewed best as a naked, filthy throng of zealots and acolytes pawing and biting at one another. You have to make those people happy, or so the wisdom goes. In effect, your job as a candidate is to cover yourself in as much pigshit as possible in order to convince the filthy throng that you are just like them. You just keep glopping it on, the wet slaps of hog ordure echoing through the auditorium as you dance and gambol about, ooking and gabbling and urinating everywhere. I’M JUST LIKE YOU, you must grunt and gibber.

I AM JUST LIKE YOU.

Ah, but then you win the nomination.

Then you go to the big race, where you no longer are trying to appease the lunatic mass of your tribe. Now you’re trying to appeal to the larger voting body — more or less everyone. You really can’t win that election by impressing only your party. You gotta shoot down the middle. So, in the first race, you shellac yourself in swine feces. And in the second race, you now have to convince the rest of us that no sir, I never covered myself in pigshit, not once, not ever, never will, nope, nope, nope. What’s that smell? It’s not me. It’s the other guy. What’s that? You have video of me pouring buckets of farm filth over my head? That’s not me. That’s somebody else. I’m your guy.

In the primary race, you have to aim for the fringes.

And in the presidential race, you have to aim for the center.

This might sound like you ultimately appealing to everyone by the end — the farthest-flung and the most moderate — but that’s not really how it works. Because moderates and fringe people don’t really see eye to eye. This isn’t scoring points. This is allying with opposing groups and then trying to pretend you never did that. This is clan politics. This is tribal warfare. (And really, it’s a result of the very limited two-party system — but that’s a discussion for another day.)

Now, ultimately, this is true for both parties. But here’s where I attempt to shut down false equivalency (aka the excuse of BOTH PARTIES ARE JUST AS BAD) and where I further show my admittedly liberal (if not explicitly Democratic) bias —

The GOP covers itself in a far stinkier brand of pigshit.

Like, the Democrats? Their pigshit smells mostly pretty nice. You may not like it. You may not think it’s effective enough, or the right smell, or that it’s too nice, but at the end of the day, the liberals usually come out of the gate trying to convince their base of their basic humanity — right? They want health care and less war and fewer guns to kill ourselves with — their pigshit is, for better or for worse, optimistic. Maybe that optimism is ideal. Maybe it’s naive. Maybe it’s a lie. (That’s for you to decide.) At the end of the day, the Democratic party is more moderate, and so their political base lines up more cleanly (if imperfectly) with the moderate outlook.

The GOP though, they get worse every cycle. Their shit stinks louder every time. It’s as if Rush Limbaugh impregnated the party years back with his demon seed, and that baby’s been swelling and bloating inside the beast ever since. The GOP is increasingly reducing their pigshit down like a fine French sauce until its potency is truly eye-watering. It’s no longer enough to say blah blah blah you want smaller government and fiscal responsibility. Now you have to want no government at all. Now you have to somehow pull off the spine-bowing gymnastics where you convince your party that you’re running for governmental office yet are mysteriously anti-government. Worse, you have to claim to want no government while at the same time claiming to want more government intervention in things like, say, women’s uteruses. You’ve gotta be a total shithead, actually — you have to say you hate women and brown people and Muslims and science? What’s science? Isn’t science the thing that makes Jesus sad? Yeah, no, fuck science, science has never gotten us anywhere ever. Remember the Dark Ages? THOSE WERE THE BEST OF TIMES. Jesus will tell you. He loved the Dark Ages. In fact, you have to commit to the positively Satanic act of convincing people you’re a total JESUSHEAD while simultaneously taking political positions that would’ve made the Real Jesus turn into an actual white person because of how pale he’d go — if Jesus were here right now, we probably would’ve convinced him that we simply do not deserve to live. All that love thy neighbor bullshit would fall by the wayside as he reluctantly commanded the Second Deluge to sweep us all away. Maybe he’d call that Second Deluge “global warming,” and then he’d laugh as we all drowned in the boiling water that the GOP said was never coming because, if you’ll recall, science is stupid and climate change is a lie.

And JESUS FORBID you’re actually reasonable. The more reasonable you are, the deeper your poll numbers plunge. Jon Huntsman came out of the gate and was like, “Global warming is real and the GOP should’ve been leading the way on gay marriage because that’s the epitome of the government staying out of your business,” and I’m pretty sure a broken toaster would’ve gotten better poll numbers. Meanwhile, Ben Carson wants to convince you he tried to stab a kid and that Jesus filled the Pyramids with Secret Jesus Frankenstein Monsters, and Trump wants you to know that fuck you, that’s what, and those two kookaloons are soaring in the poll numbers.

All the while, you hear the moist sounds of pigshit hitting skin.

SLAP. SPLAP. SPLURCH. PBBBT.

And the tribe moans and applauds and moves together with the gallumphing sameness of a slime mold whose glistening pseudopods writhe in squishy unison.

Then they win the nomination, quick wash off, and try to convince you they don’t think all the horrible things they think — or at least that they never said the horrible things they said.

(As a sidenote, this is one of the reasons I’m dubious of Bernie Sanders’ ability to win the nomination. Setting aside the fact he’s old and yells at you like your grandpa, his politics — while smart and lovely! — are also probably outside the scope of the moderate middle American vibe. I may be cynical here and I do like him. But I worry. I worry.)

How do you fix it? Fuck, I dunno. I dunno if there is a fix. The 24-hour-news-cycle makes it worse. The 25-hour-tornado-ragey-snark-fest that is the Internet exacerbates it. The laws allowing money in politics ensures that corporate interests trump human interests. The two-party system — well, I already went there. Lots of people vote for the presidential contest, but too few vote for any of the local or state ones. Maybe it’s fixable. I dunno.

But my fear is that it keeps on swirling the drain like this. That the stench of pigshit gets stenchier. That politics continues to be a hold-your-nose affair.

Then again, Canada just elected Trudeau, so what do I know? Maybe a better day truly awaits.

Maybe we should just listen to The Oatmeal reminding us, “It’s going to be okay.”

ANYWAY. So, that’s the primary process, explained through ANIMAL WASTE.

More on the big contest later, when our party’s KINGSLAYERS have been decided!

Wooooo!

*cry-vomits into open hands*