The Mythcreant Podcast 545 – Middle Book Problems
It’s not the beginning or the end, not the first or last book. But rather, the book in the middle. Usually, this means book two in a traditional trilogy, but it can refer to TV shows, movies, and any other type of story. Sometimes the middle story isn’t the second installment, but the third, fifth, or even a group of stories in the middle of a series. These all have similar problems though. The writer has already deployed their big guns to get readers into the first book, and it’s not time to wrap things up yet, so what happens? Fortunately, we’ve got some tips!
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Arturo. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Bunny: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast, with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
[opening song]Bunny: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Bunny. And with me today is…
Chris: Chris.
Bunny: … and…
Oren: Oren.
Bunny: Today we’re talking about middle books, which have a couple issues unique to them, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. So, for instance, they’re easily angered and they’re more likely than other books in a series to become delinquents. They also often feel pretty neglected compared to the first and last books.
Chris: Do they?
Oren: The first book is the one that everyone has high expectations for, and then the last, youngest one is the baby. So, yeah, the middle books, they have some issues to work out.
Bunny: They have to fight for attention, which is something that is true of both middle children and middle books, which I realized when setting up this joke.
Chris: Instead of either middle children or middle books. I have to say: people get way into birth order discourse.
Bunny: They do. I was looking at middle child stereotypes and people go quite far down that pathway.
Oren: If we’re not categorizing ourselves by birth order, what is even the point, I would say. Do we even have an identity at that point?
Bunny: I love when they conflict, where it’s like, “They’re quick to anger and to provoke their siblings, and then it’s like, “They’re peacekeepers.” Okay, if they’re both, then they’re just, like, a person, and sometimes they’re angry and sometimes they’re peacekeepers.
Chris: Maybe we should start giving book astrological readings.
Oren: Whoa!
Bunny: Ooh!
Chris: Based on the day you started the project. Actually, I would not be surprised if some writers waited until an auspicious astrological day to start writing a new book.
Bunny: That has to exist.
Oren: That’s such a Pisces thing to do. I’ve never heard anyone say, “That’s such a Pisces thing to do.” As a Pisces, I feel left out. It’s always like, “Oh, that’s such a Virgo.” “That’s such a Leo thing to do.” No one cares about Pisces, is my point.
Bunny: Hey, it’s better than everyone only having bad things to say about Gemini, which is my issue. “You’re two-faced and pretty evil” and, okay, thanks. I was just born in May. And if we’re talking about the actual star alignments, I’m actually a Taurus, but let’s not broach that debate. So, yeah, we’re talking about the second books in series. Specifically in trilogies, the middle book. It’s the sophomore effort, the difficult second album, the middle child of the book world. And as it turns out, they are pretty often neglected.
Chris: The book that often does not open the series or end it. Therefore, what is it even for? What do you do in middle book?
Bunny: It’s middle books all the way down.
Chris: Yeah, it goes deep, man. And they all get your hand-me-downs.
Oren: What do you do in the middle of a single book, for that matter? It’s all connected. It’s all fractals.
Bunny: I feel like it’s pretty uncommon for me nowadays to see just a pair of books. I don’t know if this is just the circles of books I’ve been reading, because maybe spec fic is especially apt to being divided into three, but usually what I see are either standalones, trilogies, or long series. I can’t off the top of my head think of a complete pair of two books.
Chris: There are duologies. At the same time, I do wonder if traditional publishers encourage the trilogy by frequently doing three-book deals.
Oren: I don’t know to what extent publishers want trilogies. I do know that authors think publishers want trilogies. This is one of those things where it’s often really hard to read what publishers actually want. They’re not really open about it, and you have to scoot around the edges and try to find people who work in the publishing industry and are willing to talk on their podcasts. It’s hard to say, but it’s pretty easy to tell that writers think that publishers want trilogies. So that certainly influences it a little bit, at least.
Bunny: At least we seem to be done with that thing where you make a movie trilogy, but you split the last one into two. I haven’t seen that in a while. That was kind of the teen dystopia symptom, came along with that.
Chris: I’m sure as soon as we have a super profitable adaptation of a really big IP into a series of movies, that will happen again.
Oren: Honestly, we’re overdue for a big romantasy adaptation. I’m surprised that hasn’t happened yet.
Bunny: Don’t speak it into existence. It’s gonna be Fourth Wing or something.
Oren: It’s gonna; there’s so much money there. What are you talking about?
Chris: That’s true. It’s true. It’s probably grinding through the Hollywood meat processing plant at the moment.
Chris: I would watch that instead of another MCU movie, especially since the very samey first-person narration that every romantasy seems to have would not… probably not be that present In a movie.
Bunny: That’s true; that would make it a lot more tolerable, at least for me. So I do think that middle books have some issues unique to them and not to the first and final books in a trilogy. I just read the second Mistborn book, and boy, did it have some Middle Book Syndrome. I think they have a couple particular challenges. In each book, you want to have a complete arc. You want to have the beginning, middle, and end, and the first book usually does that well, but then the second book, it doesn’t always do that well, but it seems like the first book, it does the resolution better than the second book. The second book is often there to build to the third book, which means it can’t resolve too much, especially if the series isn’t planned out in advance. That’s a huge issue.
Chris: Actually, I would say the problem with middle books is that an arc doesn’t have a beginning, middle, and end. I think that is an oversimplification that comes from Aristotle, and then Syd Field just repeating that over and over again. But an arc has basically a beginning, and then if it’s a tension arc, an end that’s a turning point resolution that usually comes pretty close together. And then it’s like we don’t know what to do with the middle. And the answer is more arcs, more smaller arcs. A lot of times that’s very nebulous. A lot of different things can go there, and so that doesn’t give the middle in the series as much of an identity and doesn’t leave people to know what they should put there.
Oren: Well, from a practical standpoint, especially for less established authors, when you’re writing the first book, you want it to be as engaging as possible. So you bring out all the big guns as early as you can. You’ve got coolest villain and your cool powers, and you don’t want to save cool stuff for later, because there might not be a later. You don’t know. And then you get to, “Oh, this was reasonably successful; I should do another one.” And what is there left to do? I have encountered a number of books that seem to have that problem where it kind of feels like you wrapped everything up in the first one. What are we doing here?
Chris: Again, as Bunny pointed out, if you plan the series, and you understand how structure works, which a lot of people don’t, so… but if you do, then you can plan a series plot and you can give each book its own arc that’s like a child arc of a series plot. But, see, even with that, it’s hard to estimate how long a certain arc will take. I’ve definitely noticed this in my own writing, where I’ll be like, “Surely this will be three chapters,” and I get there and it’s one chapter and, “Oh no. I could have tacked this on to the end of book one, but I promised my publisher a trilogy.” Oops.
Bunny: Between planning and realization, but at least in that case, you’ve left something open. Or instead, if you’re not planning a series at all and you just do book one, a big problem could be that you just tie up everything really neatly and then there are no problems left to solve. So at that point, you need to invent a new problem and split that into two to get your second and third book if you’re planning a trilogy.
Oren: This is an interesting one, is that you very often get a book one that is kind of self-contained, and then with book two, it’s more like just part one of book three, and I don’t entirely know why authors do that. Maybe it’s Empire Strikes Back‘s fault. Empire Strikes Back isn’t exactly like that, but you can see how some authors might get that idea where the first Star Wars movie is like, well, the series could mostly end here and it would be fine, but clearly Star Wars can’t end at the end of Empire Strikes Back. It needs another movie after that.
Chris: I think there are a couple reasons. One is, just as we said, a lot of times when a storyteller plans a standalone work, that’s all they’re thinking about. But if they do book two or story two, that’s the point at which they often know that there’s also gonna be a story three. And if they don’t think about, “Yeah, the middle book also needs to have some payoff at the end,” they might just make a story that lasts two stories and then just chop it right in half without any good closure. But also, there is a tradition of having the penultimate story have more of a cliffhanger ending to sort of like rev the audience up for the final installment. Doing it with a trilogy feels a little mean. Sometimes I wouldn’t judge it too hard, but at the same time, that feels like a more dramatic choice than, for instance, if you have a series of five and the fourth book has a more cliffhanger-y ending.
Oren: At least with some authors, they have a thing where they, assuming they are planning, they’re like, “Okay, I know how my story starts and I know how it ends,” and then they have a problem filling in everything in between. And so when you blow it up to a trilogy, or even not just a trilogy, sometimes more than that, you have that problem but for an entire book, where it’s like, “All right, I imagine how my story begins, and then I know what the finale’s gonna be, and in the middle something should happen, presumably.”
Bunny: The risk is a lot of dragging. So you’ve planned a trilogy, and the second book, you’ve overestimated how long it would take, or maybe you planned the trilogy and you had this part in mind, but now that you’re there, you realize it’s not like meaty enough to sustain a whole book, and then the book feels like the characters are just spinning in circles and killing time until the next installment. This was a lot of what I felt in Mistborn 2, where we have some of the least compelling parts of the first book kind of brought to the forefront, like Vin’s romance with Elend, which was never very interesting to me. I guess, spoilers: it ends in marriage (question mark), which I was very confused by.
Oren: I think that book’s old enough that you don’t have to spoil or tag it.
Bunny: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, spoilers for a, what? 2000s book, early 2010s.
Oren: That book is old enough to drive. If you were trying to read it without spoilers, it’s probably too late by now.
Bunny: Yeah, that’s true. But then it felt like a lot of time wasting, like we introduced a character that I very much dislike as an inclusion in the book, called Zane, our One Direction boy, because that’s the only other place I’ve heard of a Zane, who comes in to tempt Vin to just, like, run away. And he’s insaaaane!
Oren: I was hoping he was gonna be Zany. That’s a better pun.
Bunny: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Chris: Ooh, that is a better pun. They couldn’t go for it, though. I thought he was supposed to be like the Danger Boy alternative to the Love-and-Trust.
Bunny: He is, but it’s unclear. It kind of felt like it was teetering on the edge of a love triangle, but Vin mostly seems like philosophically interested in him, and for there to be an excuse for Vin to have a bunch of stakes-less fight scenes with him where they’re just sparring.
Oren: I think, therefore I romance. Philosophical interest, you know?
Bunny: Pretty much. Here’s one of my big issues with Sando, is he’s so good at writing friendship. Why can he not just write friendship? You could have not done the thing with Elend. The dynamics between all of the friends are so much better than that dynamics of any romance in these books.
Chris: He’s so big it’s definitely not pressure from publishers. Because sometimes with newer authors, they could be like, “Oh, well, this book isn’t marketable unless you add romance to it,” or something, and they can feel pressure. But with somebody like Brando Sando, you know that’s not an issue. He can do whatever he wants.
Oren: Though he was less big in 2007.
Bunny: This was pretty early in his career. I think he was just coming off of Wheel of Time, right?
Chris: Oh, that’s true! That’s right, Mistborn, maybe he did feel pressure at that time.
Bunny: I don’t know if it feels forced in the sense of the way that a lot of movies will force a romance, like it feels forced in the sense of he’s like, “The most interesting relationship to have between the male character and the female character is romance, so I’m going with that.” In fact, he’s very good at writing interesting friendships and quite bad at writing interesting romances.
Chris: If it’s not interesting, that for me raises the question if no interest is going into it. So if an author just doesn’t really have much interest in a specific plot element and a specific arc, it tends to become bland because it has no detail and no creative energy, and it’s just kind of neglected.
Bunny: And it was like that in the first book. And that’s kind of an issue with the second book as well, because that’s supposed to be driving Vin and Elend’s arcs. Well, Elend’s arc is more like… God, someone’s gonna come into the comments and tell me it should be Eh-lend. Ee-lend. We’re going with Ee-lend.
Chris: Look, this is how people know that we read a lot, is that we mispronounce all of our words, okay? You gotta take pride.
Oren: I’ll call him Eye-land just to round out all the possibilities.
Chris: Even better.
Bunny: Yes, Eye-land. His arc is about getting cleaned up essentially and being a better king. But Vin’s arc is like, “What if I’m too special and they’re using me?” which is why we have to have Danger Boy.
Oren: What if she is too special, though? She’s pretty special.
Bunny: She is pretty special, which is another issue, but we don’t have to get into that too.
Chris: I do think this kind of dinking around, which is what a lot of times the second book feels like, where there’s no direction, because this book doesn’t have the beginning of the series, it doesn’t have the end of the series, so how do we use this space? And a lot of times it lacks good structure and characters are just twiddling their thumbs and talking with a Danger Boy, but with no chemistry or what have you. I think something that’s very related to that, that tends to happen, is often the second book is when the bloat begins. So we’ve talked about… ugh, it’s probably been a really long time. We’ve talked about chronic series bloat, is what I’ve always called it, where this pace of the books gets slower and slower and slower with each new installment because the storyteller keeps adding more viewpoints and keeps doing more worldbuilding and adding more places, because the assumption is like, “Oh, well, now I’m doing a series, therefore I can expand it into my huge grand vision,” but you can’t keep things moving at a good pace at that point.
Oren: Chris, you can just say Wheel of Time. It’s fine.
Bunny: Talk about something that’s not a trilogy.
Oren: It’s interesting to hear about this in regards to Mistborn, because I only ever read the first one, and part of the reason I only ever read the first one was that at the end of the first one, they defeat the big bad, the super evil emperor guy. And I’m like, “All right, I guess the story’s over.” Like, it seemed odd that there was even a sequel. And this kind of reminds me of a more recent book that is new enough. I will give a spoiler warning for The Bone Shard Daughter. And I think this demonstrates a similar issue to what Chris was talking about with the series bloat, but also an instance of the author shifting from a kind of story they are very good at and clearly prepared for to one that they are not as good at, ’cause the first one is this very, for the most part, tightly plotted story of this princess with an evil king dad who uses creepy bone magic, and she’s trying to figure out what the heck is he up to and how is he doing his creepy bone magic? And she’s trying to figure all that out, and then that story ends and she defeats her dad and decides to stop doing creepy evil bone magic. And so what’s book two about? ’cause there’s not really much in book one to indicate what the sequel would be, and so then the sequel is like her trying to rule this empire, but the story is just not good at that. It was good at this really tight, focused drama. The big epic politics just end up not making any sense.
Chris: You could take this as inherently in a very different position if in book two they are ruling.
Bunny: I mean, that is also kind of Mistborn. In book one, it’s kind of a heist book, like they’re trying to kill the emperor guy and cause political uprising. And in book two they have the city now and it’s like a siege, like, that’s the main conflict of the book, is it’s a siege, and that means they’re sitting around in the city a lot.
Oren: My first tip is: don’t write characters under siege. I mean, unless you know how sieges work, and you, know, do the whole active defense thing. Just sitting around while you’re under siege is not exciting.
Chris: I imagine you have to really understand sieges to make a cool, fun, exciting conflict out of a siege. Otherwise, everybody’s just eating rats. Sounds like it would be really bleak. And not actually tense.
Oren: They’re kind of miserable and grinding. It’s funny ’cause if you… they go through this weird curve where, if you don’t know anything about sieges, you’re like, “Oh, there’s some bad guys camped outside. Oh, well,” and then you can kind of continue life as normal. If you know a little bit about sieges, it’s like, “Oh, well, everything sucks, now we’re eating rats.” And then, once you know a lot about sieges, you’re like, “Oh, actually sieges are very dynamic and have a lot going on.” You just need to show that part.
Bunny: It was definitely supposed to be more of a political conflict and like playing two different armies that are sieging the same city against each other. But that’s the sort of conflict… that’s like a couple of meetings.
Oren: This chapter could have been an email.
Bunny: Right? And the rest of it is like Vin hopping around playing with Zaid or Zane or whatever his name is. And then Elend getting tidied up, and some genuinely good scenes between Vin and her kandra, which, again, friendship being the best Sando type of relationship, and between the two terrorist people, which is a very small romance. I’ll give him that one. That was a good tiny soft romance.
Oren: Here’s the thing, actually; in the past I have recommended to authors: “Hey, if you get to the end of your book and you think that that storyline has gone as far as it can go, one thing you can do is change the kind of story you’re telling.” So, in abstract, it’s not like I’m against going from a story that was kind of personal or heist-based to a story about ruling, but you gotta be ready to do that. You do have to acknowledge that is a different kind of story.
Bunny: Admittedly, I thought the type of story this would shift to, I thought it would turn into an adventure story where we’re, “Oh, we’re gonna go find the Well of Ascension,” because the first book was setting it up as being in the mountains and stuff, and then the ending of this book was like, “Actually it was underneath the city all along.” Okay… So much for the adventure story.
Oren: Oh. Well, that’s nice. We didn’t have to go anywhere.
Chris: That does bring up the question of how many changes in book two are too much changes. Because you do have to cater to the people who liked book one, because that’s an audience that’s going to read book two. And I do think that you can have a totally different plot, like, if you want intrigue now because the protagonist is ruling, but similar types of conflicts I think is probably for the best. So if you have, for instance, lots of fights in book one, and you’re doing intrigue in book two, you should probably find reasons for fights to happen in that intrigue.
Oren: I think that your second book should open with your original main character dying in a really embarrassing way, and then another character can turn to the camera and be like, “What, did you think it was about the same character? Wow, how trite.” That’s my favorite way to open a second book.
Chris: No!
Bunny: What book hurt you?
Chris: Did… did somebody do that?
Oren: Not directly, no. You could say I am synthesizing a number of different, really up-their-own-ass openings of different books that I’ve seen.
Bunny: The problem is I could totally believe a book would do that.
Chris: I am pretty skeptical of changing main characters. Generally, I think if you want to switch to a new character, it’s better if you start a whole new plot. So basically you have different books in the same world, but there’s less expectation that somebody has to specifically read through with first one main character and then the other main character. Instead, they can pick up either book in any order. I think that’s better and it sets expectations better. The exception I make is when we have set expectations, well, where we have like an ensemble, a team, that they’re together for the entire series, and each book focuses on a different one. For instance, Wings of Fire. That would be an example I think that’s fine. Because, again, the important characters are still pretty central to the story all the way through, and it sets expectations well.
Oren: Theoretically.
Chris: Theoretically it can. But we can say that about any storytelling advice. “You should do this.” “Oh, but what if they mess it up?” Well, I can’t stop people from messing things up.
Oren: I just remember how every Wings of Fire book opens with what feels like a specially made premise to get the other four dragonets out of the way. “This is weird, man. Why are we doing this?”
Bunny: I will say, now that you said that, I could see a direction Sando could’ve gone with this, that would’ve gotten me the adventure plot I was looking for, is just to follow,… Oh, no, I’m gonna get corrections on this one too. Sah-zed? Sayzd? Sa-zeed? The Terrisman character.
Oren: Skarsgaard.
Bunny: Skarsgaard. To follow Skarsgaard, who is traveling around at the start of the book and then goes to Luthadel, which is under siege, and so now he’s part of the siege. But I found him traveling around in quite an interesting part of the book, so if the series had been completely different and followed him in the second book, that could have been a direction to go with. I could see that having been something that worked. I don’t know. It would probably disrupt everything else, but, you know.
Oren: I’d read a sequel about this… Saw Gerrera guy, I guess. That’s his name, right?
Bunny: Yeah, yeah. Chainsaw Massacre, I think.
Oren: One of the ones that I find really baffling, and I have seen this one, although it was in a video game and not a book, is when they introduce an unimaginably large problem that we’re gonna have to deal with by the end of the third installment. And if you’re like, “Okay, well, the second is definitely gonna be about getting ready to fight that thing, ’cause we need to get ready. We’re clearly no match for it right now.” And then they just spend the second one just chasing off some random baddies, and I’m talking about Mass Effect.
Bunny: You knew we were getting there eventually.
Oren: The end of Mass Effect 1, the Reapers are coming and they’re basically unstoppable and you’re not even on the same level as them. And all right, well, Mass Effect 2 is gonna be about trying to find a way to kill Reapers, right? No. Here are some new bad guys: the Collectors. They’ve always been here.
Chris: Especially since Mass Effect desperately needed that time to find some way to defeat these all-powerful bad guys.
Oren: And then they just don’t. And Mass Effect 2 ends and we’re no closer to defeating the Reapers than we were at the end of Mass Effect 1. And so Mass Effect 3 has to introduce the Star Child to brute-force us there. And it’s just… why?
Chris: If I were to give a role to middle books, at least on a lot of speculative fiction, I would say the middle book is where the protagonist gets ready to do a big, intense final showdown against the baddie. And meanwhile, the baddie is maneuvering in place to do their master plan. And that’s not necessarily… you still have to make a problem with stakes to go with that, but that’s often where the protagonist does a lot of leveling up and training and other things like that.
Oren: I mean, you still need to make that an arc. They can’t just be lifting weights for the whole book. But yes. I’m just imagining if this had been how Lord of the Rings was written. And so, in Fellowship they’re like, “Man, Mordor is really far away. We gotta get there.” And they make some progress. And then in Two Towers, instead of continuing to Mordor, they spend the whole book hanging around at some elf city, and then at the end they’re like, “Oh, crap, we needed to get to Mordor.” And then the eagles show up and take them the rest of the way. It’s kind of what it feels like.
Bunny: See, I almost feel like that’s also something Mistborn was trying to do, because you have what’s going to be probably the ultimate villain, which is the Deepness, which is a shadowy, cosmic horror mist creature. But after the siege, it almost felt like an epilogue where they go and they find the Well of Ascension in the basement, and then it turns out that this power that the Hero of Ages is supposed to release, that’s the Deepness, actually. So now the Deepness has been released upon the world. Thanks, Vin and also Bland Boy Elend is a Mistborn now, which I am not a fan of, but we’ll see what they do with it in the third book.
Oren: Oh, wait, so this Chosen Hero actually did something bad?
Bunny: Yeah, I know. Shocking twist. So here’s what the Deepness has been doing, which should have been a bigger part of the book in my opinion, is that it’s been actively corrupting the prophecies and stuff like that. Like it’s implied that it might have made the prophecies to get itself out of there.
Oren: I owe Brando Sando an apology, because I have complained for years that the thing that I really didn’t like about the first book was that it came really close to subverting the Chosen One trope when we thought the evil emperor was the Chosen One and that he was evil. But then we found out the last second, no, this guy is not the Chosen One, he killed the Chosen One and subverted the prophecy, but then it turned out the prophecy was evil the whole time! So there you go! We did it! We got there!
Bunny: There you go. Forgiven. The third book is called The Hero of Ages, and I have not read it yet, so maybe we’ll retract this criticism.
Oren: That’s how I look at stories, for sure.
Chris: That’s the official Mythcreants standpoint. We are finally adopting the position that countless fanrages have chided us to do.
Oren: Don’t critique until you’ve read the whole series. And don’t critique after that, ’cause someone might always add more books in the future. You don’t know.
Chris: The lesson of this episode is apparently: always read the second book, because it will erase any mistakes in the first book.
Bunny: We’ll see. One of my friends who has read the series asked me, “Oh, who do you think is the Hero of Ages?” And I’m like, “It seems like Vin would be too obvious.” If it’s Sah-zed, I’ll be confused but pleasantly surprised. If it’s no one, I’ll be satisfied. If it’s Elend, I’ll riot.
Oren: It’s definitely gonna be like a Sazbod Bodsaw. That’s the Hero of Ages right there.
Bunny: Hero of Ages name if I’ve ever heard one.
Oren: Now that we’ve figured out who the Hero of Ages is, I think we will go ahead and call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you found this episode useful, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
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