Middlemarch

Thoughts on blazing a trail through the wilderness that is the middle of long tales

Start Middle End

The start of every tale, long or short, gives its talesman a secure perch to hang onto. He must introduce the setting and characters to his audience. Just where the start should come is a muddle, at times, but once the talesman has made up his mind about that, he has a fairly easy time in telling it. And the end of every tale, long or short, gives its talesman a definite goal to grab. Maybe the start and the end are easier because they are buttressed by nothing in the tale: the start takes the audience into the tale from their lives, and the end gives them back to their lives out of the tale. The middle of a short tale is also simple enough; the start and the end both lie in sight of what comes between, they share a mood or tone, and every sentence brings the talesman and his audience closer to the end. But the middle of a long tale is a trackless wild.

Middle Middle Middle

The middle of a long tale has only tale before it, tale beyond it. The start sets forth the predicament, and the end resolves it; the middle just wanders through trouble upon trouble, and sometimes the talesman can lose his sense that he’s getting anywhere at all.

The middle of the middle, or mid-point of the tale, is pointed out as something of note in screenplay courses, where structure is vital. But there is no logical, inherent basis to see the mid-point as special, is there? There is on the other hand logic behind the opening, the ending, the first curtain, and the second curtain as special points along the tale’s path.

Once the predicament is set, the hero must deal with it, and the action throughout the second act, or middle, ought to be ‘rising’ as they say, which means that the audience should feel a growing suspense as they hear the middle of the tale recounted. This suspense is just another way of saying that the audience should feel more fear lest the ending turn out the way they don’t want it to, and they should feel more hope that it would turn out the way they do want it to, at the same time.

There’s a feeling of a bump or a jolt at the first and second curtains. Once the predicament is locked in place, the hero must take on the problem, and there is no escape or going back for him. And when the second curtain (or ‘climax’) is passed, everything is decided, and there is but to play the last hand, do or die. The second curtain comes when the roulette manager says, ‘Rien ne va plus,’ and the ball is in the wheel; you can’t add to your bet or change it or take it back. All the tension of the bet comes when you decide which number to bet on, and how many chips to put there; once the wheel spins, you can feel a bit of ease, for the matter is out of your hand. But the action of the wheel is at its height just after the words are said, ‘Rien ne va plus.’

In poker, you feel the most tension when you make up your mind which cards to hold and how many to take, and whether to match or raise the stakes. But once the stakes are matched at last, and ‘Call’ is uttered, there is only the laying-down, and the result. And yet it is there we see the most action.

If then we look on the middle of a tale as rising action, why can we point to the middle as an inflection point?

The Jagged Edge

First let’s consider the curve of the rising action in an abstract way. There are four shapes the curve can take:

1. Accelerating
2. Decelerating
3. Straight
4. Jagged

The Accelerating curve rises more steeply as it climbs. It is parabolic and has no inflection points. The Decelerating curve rises less steeply as it climbs. It is parabolic in the opposite direction and has no inflection points. The Straight line rises at the same steepness all the way through. It is flat and has no inflection points. The Jagged curve rises, then slows and falls back, then rises anew; each new peak reaches higher than the peaks that came before it, and each new valley sits higher than the valleys that came before it. The jagged curve has thus two inflection points for each set of rise-and-fall.

The jagged curve is more amenable to breaking the long tale’s middle into shorter chunks; each rise-and-fall set becomes its own small sequence of scenes. The jagged curve also feels more natural, i.e., it feels more like our own real life struggles in pursuit of a long-term goal.

This lets us pick out one of these inflection points, a peak or a valley, for our hypothetical mid-point. But if we have more than one peak and valley, which shall we choose? Even if we have only one peak and one valley on the way to the second curtain, should we pick the peak or the valley to call our mid-point?

Mirrors

The only theory that makes sense to me, of those I have seen, is that the mid-point mirrors the second curtain in the same way that the second curtain mirrors the final resolution. That is to say that if the end will be happy, the second curtain will paint itself in the gloomiest of hues, and thus the mid-point comes as a peak, a point of false hope and optimism. But if the end will be unhappy, the second curtain will serve as a high point of false hope, and the mid-point ought then to be a valley, a setback of the audience’s hopes.

(Composed on keyboard Wednesday, May 21, 2008)