I’m cutting it close here, scrambling to send you my latest craft essay before I disappear for a bit. We’re off on a road trip to Charlottesville, VA in the morning for some rafting, fly fishing, hiking, and a big ol’ fat reset after wrapping up a draft of my work-in-progress. Perhaps a Billy Strings concert, if we can land tickets. Anyone?

Oh, I might carve out some time to let Otis and Margot and the gang from Red Mountain come out to play, see if they want more page time. More soon there…

If you have any suggestions for road-trip entertainment, bring it! I’m looking for music, podcasts, or audio books. The Grateful Dead just released a new app called Play Dead that features a large chunk of their catalogue in freshly mastered perfection. You can bet I’ll be torturing my family for hours!

Let’s jump into all things midpoint. These craft essays are not only for budding writers; they are for all of you word lovers who are interested in taking a look under the hood. I intended on keeping this one short, but what do you do. I have so much to say.

(Remember you can always listen via the button above or on Apple or Spotify a day or so later.)

You know that feeling you get after lunch, when your belly’s full, and you’ve been working all morning, and it’s all you can do to push through with the rest of your tasks through the afternoon? Cue the espresso shot! Thank you, Europe!

The espresso shot is the midpoint.

Imagine a cork board in your mind. Put a pushpin on the far left where your story begins; put a second one on the far right at the end. Now tie a piece of string from one to the other. See that sag in the middle? Guess where we’re going to put a third push pin. Yep! Hello, Sag, meet Midpoint.

By the time the reader has reached the middle of your book, she has pushed through on the excitement of whatever had led her to the story in the first place. She’s flipped pages even if she was bored, as she’s committed to giving it a chance. But as she wanders into the midpoint, she may have lost momentum. She’s wondering if this book is worth finishing. Or if she should hop onto TikTok to watch a coyote howl to the music of a guy in his boxers playing banjo.

That’s when she needs a jolt. Something to keep her from setting the book down.

Liz Pelletier of Entangled Publishing brilliantly said in a speech at a NINC conference:

Write as if you’re telling your spouse a story and trying to keep him from picking up the remote.

How good is that? It’s especially apropos in this current world of short-attention spans and scrolling. Your spouse is at his weakest after lunch. See his hand moving toward the remote—or his phone—itching for a dopamine hit? How can you stop him?

I’d stun him with a Taser. Is that legal? Can you imagine how effective it would be? And cathartic? Maybe there’s a better, less violent way, though.

How about tazing him with a twist, a surprise, something he didn’t see coming. What if we inject a new piece of information that acts as a mic drop, an oh, shit! moment. There he was thinking he knew exactly where you were going with your story, but no, you were just getting started.

I’m drowning you with analogies if only to point out that there are no hard and fast rules. It can be a word, a sentence, a scene, a moment, a chapter. Your reader doesn’t even need to be aware that they’ve hit such a point.

I know when a writer understands the power of a midpoint and deploys it to good use. This day and age, let’s make it easy for the reader to push forward. Make it impossible for them to even get up to go to the restroom.

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I’ve talked about the challenges a writer has when they arrive at the midpoint. It’s not dissimilar to the feelings of a reader. You’ve been writing on the excitement of a new story. You saw so clearly what would happen in Act I and into the start of Act II, but now you’re tired and wondering if what you’ve written so far is even working? You’re faced with endless possibilities of where to go from here.

So why not get really clear on the midpoint and a way forward? Give yourself a shot of literary espresso. Reload the gun. There are a few pieces that need to be addressed. If you’ve followed me for long enough, you already know where I might be going.

Yes, we need to determine the midpoint, then load it into our rocket ship like fuel so that we’ll be shot to the end of the story, but we also need to recharge ourselves. Let’s address the latter first.

The Physical Reset

I mentioned that as I was wallowing in the middle flab of my story, I was firing blanks. As a writer on deadline, I’m no stranger to mashing keys—even if the words are landing like mushy slop on an inmate’s food tray. Sometimes, you do just have to move forward, swinging your keyboard machete till you get through the jungle.

Other times, though, you need to step back. Having done this for so long, I’m not one who needs to motivate myself to write. I’m actually the opposite. I need to accept that rest and time away and reconnecting can be even more beneficial than hitting word count.

As I was sifting through exhaustion after I’d exhaled the first half of my story onto the page, it occurred to me that I’d been locked in my dungeon for way too long, a slave to the morning routine of waking, coffee, then get to work. I was also getting bogged down by my monkey mind, so many voices expressing fears.

The answer wasn’t hiding behind forcing words. It was in reconnecting my mind to my body and to the world around me.

I took days off. I walked in nature, lay down on the ground in the woods. I sat on the rocks at the beach near our house and let the sound of the waves heal me. I meditated, ran body scans. I embraced the quiet. I read, watched movies and TV shows, played and listened to music, took pictures. Most importantly, I reconnected with my wife and son, reassuring them that I’m not just the roommate that never comes out of his office.

I slowly came back to life. I realized that all my fears weren’t worthy of the light I was giving them. Life became fun again. And I reached a point where I couldn’t stand it any longer; I had to get back in front of my keyboard.

Rolling Up Your Sleeves

Once we’ve slowed life down to the right pace, I find that the midpoint is a time for a reset. As I’ll keep saying, you don’t need to hone in on a process. Each book should be different. With this one, I wrote the first half without an outline. I don’t always do that, but it sure was fun—and exactly what this story was demanding, but it became clear that it was time to organize. I took the time needed to consider everything that had happened so far and then asked a few key questions:

What is the point of my story?

What am I trying to say?

Where is my character headed?

If they have a goal(s), will he or she realize it?

Will they keep growing or stay stagnant?

What does the final scene look like?

I talk about writing as the creator becoming a conduit and channeling this lovely energetic force that writes the story. But I have found that the midpoint is a wild horse that must be broken. It requires wrestling, it requires dealing with emotional baggage, and it often requires organization, meaning not being afraid to get dirty. You need to consider all the possibilities, take to task all the craft lessons you’ve learned.

It’s a good time to do the hard thinking and consider every side plot and character and how they play a part. It could mean spending an entire day on a minor character and figuring out what role they have. Then doing that for another character. If there’s a story question lingering, something that you’ve been trying to avoid, you might need to spend a day doing that. There’s just no easy way.

The good news is that all this planning makes for complexity as you draft your way to the end. I’m not trying to make an airline wine here. I want to weave in bits and bobs that the reader might not notice till they read the book for the second time. I want to sneak in sparks long before the fire burns.

Drilling into the Midpoint

Last we talked about my protagonist Cara, I was seeking all sorts of ways to keep her from running, because that’s all she’s ever done since she was seventeen. As the writer, I have to torture her into submission. Break her legs. Throw every one of her worst nightmares at her. I’ve done a pretty good job so far.

But as I arrived at the halfway mark of her story, I wanted to blow shit up. Drop a bigger bomb. Something that makes the reader’s jaw drop, makes them unable to put the book down.

We’ve broken Cara’s legs, but she’s using her arms to crawl now. My Gods, she’s resourceful and determined. Fine, let’s chop her arms off too. (I know, I’ve taken this way too far, breaking into Johnny Got His Gun territory. If you know, you know.)

I don’t want to reveal what I throw at Cara at the midpoint, but I remember the moment it came to me (more on that later). I’d put her through a harsh forty-thousand words of me thinking to myself, What could make it worse?, and I was starting to think that I was running out of ideas.

But no, after rebooting my physical self, reattaching mind and body, I realized I was just getting started. All I had to do was keep answering that question. And I made sure my best answer came right about halfway.

Each story requires its own sort of bomb drop. Whatever it takes to get your reader to sit up straighter and think:

I really need to cook dinner, but…

I was supposed to pick up my son twenty minutes ago, but…

Biggest interview of my life in the morning, and I need to go to bed, but…

Allow me to finish with a letter I penned to you on the exact day of my breakthrough. I’d been flirting with the idea that I was disconnected for a while, and I’d been playing with ways to break free, but it was this day that it all came together.

Dear friends,

There is light! And that’s saying a lot, because I’ve spelunked deep into the darkness lately.

Prying myself away from my office yesterday, I set out determined to embrace a mental health day. I visited our nearby market and poked around idly and chatted with the employees. I whistled on the way back home. Living as opposed to rushing.

I sharpened my knives, then made sauerkraut while listening to one of my favorite bands, Mammal Hands. Slow and methodical, no rush at all.

I sat on the deck and let the sun heal me. I sought space between the lines, the quiet.

The whole day, whenever I caught myself thinking of my story, I redirected my attention to the present.

Last night, my family and I started Rental Family on Hulu. I was committed to fully giving myself to the movie, not half-watching while scrolling through my phone. I was soon swept away into a fictive dream. What a wonderful story, a unique premise, and superb acting. When something’s working, when all of the components unite to make something magical, it’s a joy to experience. I was so high on the movie, the way art can be such a miracle.

Then it happened.

My body and mind became one again. It was as if the past couple of days I was had the key in the ignition, twisting hard, listening to it grind, but the starter wasn’t firing. But then it caught, and I felt this surge of energy rush up through me.

I was at once totally captured by the movie, but then ideas for my work-in-progress started shooting out of me. Though my family complained, I had to pause the movie to scribble things down.

I could suddenly see where I was going with the rest of Cara’s story. Funnily enough, it had nothing to do with Rental Family. It’s that I had removed the dam keeping my flow at bay. I wasn’t trying at all, but the midpoint dropped in my lap, and then I could see how that revelation pulled back the string on a bow, that I was getting ready to send my character like an arrow to the end.

Cara is awakening. That’s part of what I didn’t see. She’s making steps. Of course she is; we’re at the midpoint. But she’s not all the way there. There’s still a big chunk of story. It’s with this mini awakening, though, that she’s finding agency. She might not go the right way, but she’s determined to finally take action.

Most importantly, I feel like a kid again, and I can’t wait to shuck my shoes and jump back into the sandbox.

Love,

boo

Resilience is the key to being a writer. Period. This gig, it’s like climbing Everest every day. You have to give it your all. Having some coal to stoke the fire of your resilience will make things far easier.

That coal is faith, my friends.

No matter how ugly it gets at the midpoint, know that the end of the book is up ahead, looking back, waiting patiently for you to catch up.

Now go on, word soldiers, and put that midpoint to work.

Cheers!

boo

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