![]() The background I created for him, and his resulting personality, were really thin. I realized after examining the story outline this way, that my main character had it too easy. I saw that I needed more conflict, both internal and external, that would:ġ) drive him to get involved with the story’s events in the first place,Ģ) flesh him out as a truly three-dimensional person whose struggles readers could relate to (and want to keep turning pages), andģ) allow for a more realistic or plausible story arc where everything happened for a reason. When I looked at my story’s main character through the lens of a “mirror moment,” everything changed. To sort the loosely-connected jumble of scenes I had written so far, and to put all the pieces together in a way that made sense, I started over. As “Dirty Harry” Callahan said, “A man’s got to know his limitations.”) ![]() I gave up trying to solve that damn thing a long time ago. Like the picture suggests, I only had one side of the three-dimensional puzzle figured out, and the rest of the story was an incoherent mess. I saw a story that looked good from one angle, but in reality, it was a disaster. I took a step back and looked at my outlines (<–note the plural there). I even knew most of the scenes I wanted to put in the middle. I was making great progress on my story outline. The remainder of the story, and the protagonist’s actions after that moment, will then be justified because the reader will have experienced everything that lead the character to make the choice(s) he makes in that critical “mirror moment.” Because the author wrote it that way. By knowing ahead of time when a character will make a crucial decision about where they want/need to be, the author can move the beginning of the story to that point. Write Your Novel From the Middle suggests that authors need to know that “mirror moment” for the main protagonist in order to keep the entire story on track. He’s a killer.īut now he has a partner, he had dinner with the family, met the kids…he’s not a loner anymore. Riggs has to decide if he is going to remain a suicidal killer who doesn’t care whether he lives or dies, or if he is going to change, because now his actions may affect not only his partner’s life, but his partner’s family’s lives as well.īell doesn’t pretend to know if the film writers were thinking of this portion of a scene near the middle of the movie as a pivotal moment in the character arc of Martin Riggs, setting the stage for the action to follow, but he does explain how that’s exactly what it was. “It’s the only thing I was ever good at,” Riggs says. Standing by his truck after having dinner with his partner’s family, Riggs tells Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) about a time when he shot a guy in Laos (during the Vietnam War) from a thousand yards away in high wind. Bell calls this the “Mirror Moment.”īell uses the example of Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) in the movie Lethal Weapon as an example of a character having a “mirror moment.” I love Lethal Weapon, so it was easy for me to follow his line of reasoning when he points out that smack dab in the middle of the movie (Bell literally went to the middle of the film and, lo and behold, there it was), Sergeant Riggs has a moment of reflection–his mirror moment. His idea is really focused on that single moment in the book (the middle), where the protagonist comes to grips with who he/she really is, and who they want to be going forward. Bell offers a new way of looking at writing a novel that, as the title states, will work for anyone, no matter which method an author uses to pump out a 120,000 word manuscript, regardless of where they are in the writing process. ![]() I read a short book this week by thriller writer James Scott Bell titled Write Your Novel From the Middle: A New Approach for Plotters, Pansters and Everyone in Between. How can I say that I made progress, on the outline or the manuscript, if I didn’t write a damn thing? Well, folks, that’s what I’m gonna tell you. Go back to the second line of this post, though. I told y’all how I like to outline the entire story in multiple levels of detail before I really get to writing a manuscript, so you probably don’t see anything wrong with that first-line declaration, given the fact that I’m still in the outlining phase. But that line is more attention grabbing than, “I didn’t add a single bullet point to the 30th scene of my outline this week.” I didn’t write ONE sentence of my current book project this week.
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