WRITING THE BEGINNING, MIDDLE, AND END OF a NOVEL
- Cully Perlman
- 8 hours ago
- 7 min read
It’s fun writing a novel. It’s torturous, writing a novel. It’s never ending, writing a novel, and it’s confusing. It kills your confidence, and makes you feel like you’re an imposter, no matter how many novels or short stories you write, no matter how much acclaim and admiration you receive. But it’s fun. I can’t not write novels. And one of the first things you should be aware about is the process of writing the beginning, middle, and end of a novel.
In my case, I started writing them in my early twenties. At first, I was just messing around, copying novels I liked—the style, the dialogue, the pace. The themes. I just didn’t know how to do it on my own. I hadn’t yet developed my own voice. It’s a normal thing for beginning writers. I knew I was being derivative; I just didn’t know how to find how to get away from being derivative. Which is how most writers, I’d guess, begin their writing careers. For some authors, writing is a hobby. For others, it’s what they want to do with their lives. I fall into the latter category. I also write literary fiction, which seems to be close to the bottom of the barrel when it comes to sales. For me, one of the main things I focus on is writing the beginning, middle, and end of a novel so that I can see things clearly, but, more importantly, so that the reader can. It’s not how I start my process; it’s just something I keep at the back of my mind as I’m writing my first draft so that later, once I know what I’m writing I know how to structure the novel, which I do by outlining after that first draft is completed.
Now, that sounds obvious, right? Writing the beginning, middle, and end of a novel? I mean, that’s a must. You can’t have a “novel” without a beginning, a middle, and an end. I mean, I suppose you can if you’re writing speculative fiction, but I don’t know too many other genres where you can get away with that. It just leaves readers disappointed and dissatisfied with what you’ve done. And readers, they don’t want to feel dissatisfied. At all. They want a resolution to the questions that have been asked of them. To what happens to the people they’ve learned so much about. So, I try not to leave them in limbo. And you shouldn’t either. At least not completely.
Two days ago, I completed another full edit of a novel I’ve been working on for 23 years (yes, 23—that’s not a typo). I have a beginning I sort of like. I’ve worked on it again and again for over two decades. The beginning of my novel, which deals with the mental trauma experienced by a young boy in a small town, trauma that naturally follows him through the rest of his life, including during WWII and upon his return home, starts out with a lot of violence. Things change over the first half of the novel, yada yada yada, and he deals with the changes as best he can. Remember, this boy who has become a man has suffered trauma, and as we know, trauma can manifest itself in many ways. If you’ve thought about what you’ve just read, and if you know anything about trauma, you may have already begun imagining all of the things that this boy/man may have gone through. Things he is currently going through. And, if you continued down that line of thinking, you may already have some ideas of how his story might end. My job over the last 23 years is simply to do that boy/man justice. To share with potential readers my hero’s beginning, his middle, and his end, though not necessarily in that order. And I have to do that all while keeping readers interested in my hero’s story. That ain’t an easy thing to do.
Beginnings are easy for me. I sit down and I start writing. I don’t really ever know what I’m going to write about, at least not completely. I may have a kernel of something I’m considering: the death of a child in an accident; a woman getting ready to leave her husband; one man’s fight against disinformation as his boss runs for the presidency. Something like that. I can usually get that done within a few weeks or so. Remember, it’s just a first draft—nothing has to be perfect. Anyway, it’s during that first stab at the beginning of the novel that I discover the “voice” of the narrator, the style of the writing, the setting, the character(s), and so on. I’ll change that all later, but it’s me figuring out where I want to go with the book, at least initially. Of course, there needs to be a goal in there; characters can’t just be walking around on stage doing nothing. They have to want something, and they have to want something desperately. But I’m still learning who everyone is and so that thing they so desperately want may not yet be fully developed. And that’s okay. Remember, it’s a first draft. Anything goes.
Middles are where I struggle. For me, they tend to not be as focused as when I initially set out on my writing journey. I know what’s happened in the first third of the book. I know who wants what, even if only tangentially, and now it’s time to advance their story, but it’s also time to develop my subplot(s), to learn more about secondary characters, to create the drama that’ll keep my readers reading, if I haven’t already lost them. Remember, I write literary fiction for the most part, and comparatively speaking, people don’t buy literary fiction. They buy crime. They buy romance. They buy fantasy. Literary fiction? That’s for us nerds who prefer deeper dives into style and meaning, into books that try to “say something.” Books that are more likely to get critical acclaim than, say, a three-book deal for ten million bucks. Yes, that’s a blanket statement, and not always true. But in general, that seems to be the case.
Right now, I have three (3) completed novels out on the query circuit. Three that I think have the potential to be picked up by agents and, hopefully, eventually, published. “Have the potential” are the three key words. I’ve been doing this long enough to understand that bad books get published, great books don’t always get published, and that you never really know where you fall into even if, at the beginning of the journey, you think you do. I say this because it’s not important what you think, it’s important what an agent thinks, and what they think may have no bearing on whether or not they decide to represent you. But I digress. Middles. For me, the middle of a novel is where I tend to fall short of the oomph, as I call it. The oomph, for me, is where everything moves along supporting the initial promise I have made to my readers. For the types of novels I write—I try to be diversified in terms of the types of literary fiction I create, meaning one novel may be quick and easy writing that doesn’t take research and is written in a sort of “vanilla” style, so I create the best chance to pull in as many readers as possible, or at least not deter them from thinking the book is “heavy” writing—while another novel not only requires a lot of research but is more difficult to write because of style or voice or whatever. Think John Grisham vs Cormac McCarthy. Middles, for me, have to have the narrative move along, but it’s also where I often seek strong, material “ascending action” that includes facts of some or scenes or something that wows readers, be it derived from dramatic effect, character conflict, or some other “holy crap!” moment. Then I polish it through during my editing phase. Again, after the first draft is done.
Now to endings. I’ve heard a lot of famous writers say that they begin with the end, meaning that they must know how their novel ends before they even begin writing. Now, that applies for pantsers as well as plotters, or people who write by the seat of their pants vs writers who outline everything before they put pen to paper or finger to key. I don’t normally work that way, although endings do, occasionally, come to me as I’m writing. But I do understand why they work that way. Whenever I have an ending floating around in my brain, it’s easier to gear everything towards that grand finale. Endings for me, or after I go through the falling action and into the resolution and denouement, tend to end with a bang followed by the wrap-up. Meaning something dramatic happens to completely (or somewhat completely) change my character(s) in some way. If you recognize the structure I’m alluding to, you’ll realize it’s the structure known as Freytag’s Pyramid, which you see below. Anyway, I want my readers to walk away thinking about the novel not days or weeks or months later, but years later. And so I consciously condense the events that took place at the beginning of the novel and over the course of the novel and ensure that all the I’s are dotted and all the T’s are crossed. If a character wants to be rich, I make sure my readers know whether or not she has achieved her goal. Does that mean I say, “And Lu-Anne took the million dollars in singles to the bank?” No. I tend to write more subtle endings than that, which requires showing rather than telling, which is how novels, in my opinion, at least contemporary ones, should end. Of course there are exceptions to the rule, but it’s the skilled writers who are the once who can normally pull that type of ending off. Sometimes it works for them, sometimes it doesn’t. But that’s writing.
When you write, you have to write what’s true to you. But if you want to get published, you also have to write what’s entertaining to your potential readers. Fiction has to make sense; life does not. It’s why most fiction has to have a plot. We want to know why things happened. And a plot is all about causality. This happened AND SO this happened, etc. The king died of grief, right? He didn’t die just because the queen died. Your readers are expecting that. They want that. And you have to deliver that. Again, you just have to have a beginning, a middle and an end. They just don’t have to be in that order.
Cully Perlman is author of a novel, THE LOSSES, as well as a substantive editor and blogger. He can be reached at Cully@novelmasterclass.com
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