Hanging Out, Killing Time, & Rolling to a Stop

It’s risky to write a novel without structure.

Ever hear people say that all you need for a novel is a beginning, a middle, and an end? 

Q: How do you write a novel?

A: You just need a beginning, a middle, and an end.

That answer has always seemed to me a bit cavalier. 

Okay, a lot cavalier.

It seems like a brush-off. 

“So,” the eager young writer might ask, “how do you structure your novel?”

“Beginning, middle, and end,” says the veteran novelist. “I start writing. I keep writing. Then I stop writing.”

Oy.

Of course, it’s not enough to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. 

It’s not enough because those three things are abstractions without any causal relationship. They do not indicate growth, development, synthesis, learning, argument, or transformation—the kinds of dynamics you, as a writer, really want to be working on. 

Beginning, middle, and end are labels that you can slap on any three things. A hot dog can be cut into three pieces. A piece of paper can be cut into three pieces. Halloween candy and mashed potatoes can be separated into three piles. If you have three piles or three pieces of anything, you can point to those piles and pieces and say, “Beginning. Middle. End.” 

And . . . so what? Is that helpful to a novelist?

No. Not helpful. 

A beginning doesn’t cause the middle. An end doesn’t resolve a middle or relate to an end. They’re blobs.

And blobs don’t indicate relative length or duration. Can a beginning be a drop of rainwater, a middle be a hundred years of monsoons, and an end be the eternity that expands after we die? 

Can the beginning be a cardboard box? Can the middle be a beer belly? Can the end be a pair of green Crocs? 

Why not? 

The old saw that stories just need a beginning, middle, and end is just as vapid as it sounds. It’s a bit of cavalier oversimplification, equivalent to a rocket scientist saying, “Rocket science is simple. The rocket goes up. The rocket comes down. Easy.” 

The ideas are expressed at such a breezy level of abstraction that they offer nothing in the way of guidance to the eager student of stories or rockets. 

One of the biggest risks of believing that all you as a novelist need is a beginning, middle, and end is that you’ll end up with a passive protagonist.

You’ll end up with a passive protagonist who doesn’t confront a dilemma, doesn’t make a hard choice, doesn’t act on their desire, doesn’t struggle against an active antagonist, doesn’t meet any obstacles, doesn’t respond to the demands of life, doesn’t suffer consequences, doesn’t process their pain, doesn’t face the ghosts of their past, doesn’t overcome the temptation to quit, doesn’t learn from experience, doesn’t work to find a better way to live . . . and so on.

Instead, without causality built into your story and therefore without a plan for the growth of your main character, you’ll likely write yourself in circles of description, summary, backstory, and debate, and you’ll end up with three blobs labeled Beginning, Middle, and End.

Too often I’ll read a novel—and I’m not just talking about literary novels; I also mean genre novels, like mysteries and thrillers, family dramas and comedies—and what the novel has in place of any decent story structure is a beginning, middle, and end that are not the equivalents of Acts 1-2-3 . . .

. . .  otherwise known as Before-During-After . . . Home-Journey-Return . . . Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis . . . Stasis-Growth-Wisdom . . . or even Caterpillar-Cocoon-Butterfly . . .

. . . but are, instead, what I call Hanging Out, Killing Time, and Rolling to a Stop. 

HANGING OUT

There’s too much pressure put on the beginning of a novel.

Novelists can appreciate this. They know how much pressure is put on them to write the perfect first sentence, first paragraph, first page, first scene, and first chapter. Writers internalize this pressure and bear its burden alone, but they get external reminders of it all the time, not just from industry types (agents, editors, publishers, critics, even other writers) but also from readers (relatives, friends, etc.).

So novelists feel this pressure to write the perfect first chapter because (they’re told) a reader who is not hypnotized instantly will set the book down and—I don’t know—look at their phone.

This is not true. 

People are going to look at their phones no matter what you write. 

But it’s also not true because it’s just not how readers read. I grab a dozen books on impulse, read them, enjoy them or not, and move on. I read as a matter of habit, as a part of my life, as a thing I do. I’m sure many readers can relate. We don’t tiptoe page by page. We live shelf by overflowing shelf.

And it’s also also not true because, as a lifelong reader, I’d never finish a book if I ever held a book to the impossible standard of instantly hypnotizing . . . immediately addictive . . . and literally un-put-downable. 

A novel is a unique experience, and it demands an effort of the reader’s imagination. A novel isn’t chocolate ice cream, potato chips, a margarita, or cocaine. A novel is more like a slow build toward an integrated work, like a mural or a tapestry, like a symphony or an opera, or like architecture by Zaha Hadid or Santiago Calatrava. It rewards tolerance and openness and patience. And readers have their own weird tastes for different genres and different books, and what is chocolate ice cream to one is kale salad to another.

I prefer the steady build of the drama of a well constructed novel to a fireworks show in the first chapters and a fizzling and fading out for the entire rest of the story, which is what too often happens. 

So in the beginning, a novelist under intense pressure to meet an impossible standard hangs out with their characters and their world for far too long in the effort to make things pop and sing and soar and dive, all those moves that try to generate the illusion of a living person here, on the page, but that don’t actually function, like, say, a good catalyst, to launch a story. 

I’ve read novels where a catalyst arrives on page 100, and the hero finally embarks on the adventure of Act 2 on page 260. Writers can do whatever they want, of course, and many narrative strategies work well in the sprint of a short story and less well in the marathon of a novel. But maybe the effort to make the first pages of a novel feel immediate and deep in a sensory way (such that the reader is somehow hypnotized and addicted) can distract from the rather more mundane business of craft. 

So a writer could spend the beginning of the novel doing this:

A hero with an unfulfilled desire confronts a catalyst, debates an urgent dilemma brought on by the catalyst, and, accepting the costs, chooses to enter the Act 2 adventure to complete a difficult task in order to achieve a worthy goal, like seeking justice, finding love, stopping a war, or raising a family.

If a novelist isn’t interested in the mundane business of craft, then the novelist might get carried away trying to please those with impossible standards and so resort to dialogue and one-liners, remembered trauma and romantic reflection, reports of stormy weather and bumpy trips down memory lane, as well as stabs at contemporary humor and quips about memes. 

Funny! Sad! Sexy! Grumpy! Clever! Hip! Real! Deep! True! Knowing!

It’s a whole lotta attitude and voice and opinion and exposition because, perhaps, that’s what’s thought to lure in the reader. So we hang out with this character or this narrator or this ensemble for fifty or a hundred or even two hundred pages, and we just sort of listen to them talk and remember and ache and endure and yearn and flail . . . until someone finally decides to take the case, go on the date, get on the boat, hit the road, or trespass onto private property, and the story can, at last, begin. 

KILLING TIME

But then, after the relative fun of Hanging Out, we get, instead of an escalating middle of juicy drama, something else, which I call Killing Time. 

This is the point at which you realize the author has no idea what middles are. They don’t know what’s supposed to happen during the midpoint section. They haven’t thought about reversals and betrayals, revelations and surprises, ticking clocks or deadlines, confrontations with villains or changes of fortune. They just kind of . . . kill time. 

Now let me say I am also issuing warnings to myself here. I’m not just scolding novelists for desperate narrative strategies. I’m mostly concerned with myself and others who are about to embark on the life-changing project of writing their first or second or thirteenth novel. 

Many years ago, as a wanna-be novelist, I wanted to know how to structure a novel. I didn’t assume I’d obey a template or formula in a keystroke march of strict adherence, but . . . 

. . . I wanted to know what those templates and formulas were . . . 

. . . so that I could play with them and make them work for me. 

In other words, I was always afraid that if I had fun in the first act by Hanging Out with my characters in their world, then I’d reach the middle of the book, otherwise known as The Void, and . . . I’d freak out.

Scream to self:

“Oh, shit, what do I do now!?”

The Void of the middle scared me as a young writer, and it scares me today.

Facing The Void, the novelist has many ways to kill time. You can repeat stuff, of course. You can revisit previous scenes and try to add more information. You can go back in time and mine a character’s past. You can switch to another character or introduce a new character and hang out with them for a while. 

A reader can feel this when it happens. You the reader may have bought into the hero during Hanging Out and been excited when a character finally made a major dramatic choice, but then . . . a lull happens, when it feels like your bumper car has been jarred sideways or backwards, without much drama or purpose. 

It’s kind of like when someone in the middle of telling you a funny story says, “Oh, I forgot to tell you,” and then they give you all this background information that kills the mood. The story is no longer funny. It’s tedious.

So that’s what often happens in Killing Time. The novelist resorts to backstory, new characters, flashbacks, and new information without dramatic relevance. 

If they wanted to, the novelist could have the hero meet the antagonist in the middle of the story, like De Niro and Pacino trading mano-a-mano-logues in the diner in Heat (1995) . . . 

. . . like Batman and the Joker playing chicken on the city street in The Dark Knight (2008) . . . 

. . . or like Wesley and Buttercup escaping the Fire Swamp only to be overtaken by the Prince and Count Rugen in The Princess Bride (1987).

A confrontation between the hero and the antagonist is a pretty standard dramatic move in the middle of a story because it serves several dramatic functions: the characters reveal more of their true intentions to each other, conflicting arguments are out in the open to an extent, and the hero feels pressure to rise to the occasion even as the antagonist gains the upper hand. 

In other words, a good midpoint section functions as a big catalyst, orchestrated by antagonistic forces, which demand that the hero endure setbacks, regroup to process their failure and debate the options, and somehow find a way to press onward into the final act.

Another example of a catalyst set in motion by antagonistic forces in the middle of the story is the betrayal by an ally. One example off the top of my head is when Cipher makes a secret phone call to alert Agents to the arrival of Morpheus and Neo in the movie The Matrix (1999). This happens in the middle of the movie, when Cipher drops his phone into the trash can, and the betrayal sets up a later ambush.

So if you don’t have a plan for the midsection of your story—if you don’t have a confrontation, a complication, a betrayal, or evidence that the antagonist is succeeding in their plans despite the hero’s efforts—then you risk finding yourself in the The Void and screaming, “Oh, shit, what do I do now!?”

ROLLING TO A STOP

Rolling to a Stop is what happens when you need to wrap up your story in a way that makes it feel like things have come to an end, but instead of having a structure for your novel, you had Hanging Out and Killing Time. And now you’re in trouble.

This kind of ending is often passive. Things are wrapped up, and the hero isn’t necessarily responsible. There’s a showdown, or maybe there isn’t. Someone dies or runs away. There isn’t much synthesis of a character’s selves or much if any wisdom gained from the experience of the adventure. There’s a graduation, a wedding, a funeral, an arrest, a verdict, an imprisonment, a pregnancy, a final sunset, an early dawn. Events that otherwise may have taken months or years are summarized in paragraphs or chapters in the writer’s hope that speeding up events over a longer time period will feel exciting.

Sometimes I sense the novelist losing heart in the premise of the story. Sure, it’s fun to Hang Out with a housewife who becomes an assassin, and maybe it’s fun to Kill Time with her as she juggles her two lives, but if, in the end, she goes back to being a housewife without having paid a serious price or changed in any way, then, well, we’re just Rolling to a Stop, right back where we started.

Other times, I’ve felt like the novelist pulled punches when it came time for the showdown between hero and antagonist. I felt this in Blood Test, a recent novel by Charles Baxter (who wrote “Gryphon,” one of the best short stories ever). I bought the hardcover of the novel and was super excited. 

An insurance salesman gets a blood test that warns him he possesses criminal tendencies. Great hook! The dust jacket teases the reader with the promise of murder, but . . . Baxter loses heart in his premise. There is no criminality, no murder, no real catalyst that throws the hero into a dilemma. It throws him into an existential crisis that results in endless self-reflection, but the real downer comes at the end, during the showdown or lack thereof between the hero, who’s too liberal, versus his antagonist, who’s too right-wing. I think Baxter’s empathetic authorial self couldn’t bear a violent, decisive confrontation between two characters who symbolize America’s political divide. He lost heart. He pulled his punch. Instead of writing dramatic fiction, he wrote an essay.

And I get to pick on Baxter here because he is a superb writer of prose with a long career. He can take it. In fact, I recommend his book on writing fiction, The Art of Subtext.

Sometimes I think a novelist sets up a wonderfully difficult problem and, by the end, doesn’t know how to solve it. They’ve stymied themselves. How do they get out of this? 

And so we arrive at what I call The Temptation of Bad-faith Narrative Tricks.

After Hanging Out and Killing Time, a novelist can, in their panic at the finale of their story, feel the temptation to resort to a narrative trick.

So I will stop here and write a subsequent post about these narrative tricks which tempt a novelist who has been Hanging Out and Killing Time and is desperate to avoid Rolling to a Stop.
__________

For more on the acts in a story, see my entries on “The Acts of a Story,” Parts 1, 2, and 3.