Why The Second Half Of Your Novel Fizzled Out
Part 2 on how to fix your novel's hook, with a printable guide
I recently read a popular novel that started out very well. Every character was sympathetic, every conversation was tense. By the end of the first act, I was hooked.
But then… the story beats just kept repeating. The characters remained sympathetic—but they didn’t change. The conversations were all very tense—but they revealed nothing new.
Finally, I got to a huge, shocking plot twist, a character death so tragic I cried real tears. And after that… back to the characters having the same conversations. By the time I finished reading the book, I felt mostly disappointed.
What had gone wrong? The book had a great hook (which I’m not mentioning here), and the story certainly escalated when it reached the shocking death scene, which engaged my emotions very effectively.
But escalation isn’t the same as complication. And a story hook doesn’t work unless the author uses it to complicate the characters or plot.
Last time, we talked about how to create a better story hook; today we’ll look at how to add a complication to your hook.
Take Advantage Of Your Character’s Specific Vulnerabilities
Last time, we started with this hook for a romance novel:
A woman starts a romantic relationship with a member of a famous boy band.
… and we added an ironic twist to create this hook:
A forty-year-old woman starts a romantic relationship with a twenty-four-year-old member of the famous boy band her daughter adores. (The Idea of You by Robinne Lee)
Now imagine if the midpoint of this story introduced this escalation:
Just as the two are enjoying the famous singer’s tour, he learns his mother is gravely ill and he must quit his career to care for her.
While this is a dramatic escalation, it doesn’t really challenge the main character to face her vulnerabilities. It might lend itself to some very emotional moments in the story, and it could bring out a new side of the famous singer, but it’s mostly unrelated to the story’s hook.
Here’s another possibility for the story’s midpoint:
The famous singer decides that he needs to spend more time focusing on launching a new phase of his career, so he has far less time to spend with the main character, which puts a strain on their romance.
This is a great way to add more tension to any story about dating a career-oriented person. But it doesn’t make full use of this particular story’s hook, which means the story won’t be able to explore any complications relating to dating a much younger heartthrob.
The actual story leans into the elements of the hook that explore the main character’s specific vulnerabilities:
The main character goes on tour with the boy band, spending time backstage and with the band’s entourage, even while she tries to hide her relationship from the public—and from her daughter.
This complication allows readers see the main character, Solene, fulfill some popular fantasies (holding a permanent backstage pass! sleeping with a famous pop star every night!). It also forces Solene to grapple with intense challenges. She spends a lot of time with the band’s entourage, including younger women who make her feel a lot less confident in a bikini when she and her famous boyfriend join them poolside. And she has to be careful to stay under the radar, even while fans and the press crowd her, because she isn’t yet ready to tell her daughter about a relationship that might not be serious.
Our other example (“famous singer has to spend more time on his career”) could work if we added details that relate more to the hook. What if the famous singer not only has less time to spend with Solene but also must spend more time with a young, female publicist? What if Solene can only spend more time with the singer if she quits her well-established job to go on tour with him? These complications would make better use of the Solene’s specific vulnerabilities as expressed by the hook’s ironic twist.
Explore Your Character’s Unique Hopes and Fears
Here’s the premise of one of my favorite recent TV shows, a science fiction thriller:
Office workers whose memories have been surgically divided between their work lives and personal lives start to suspect that their employer has sinister designs. (Severance, Apple TV+)
In this situation, the character’s memories are “severed” so that they can’t remember their home lives while they’re at work (and they can’t remember their work lives while they’re at home). Each character is essentially two people—a “work self” and a “home self,” with neither self having any knowledge of the other.
As with other great thrillers, this show explores the question, What’s the worst thing that could happen in this situation? Here, the answer is that you might be forced to take part in something terrible at work while you have no recourse—no way to contact the outside world, no way to leave the office (at least, not mentally), and no way to challenge your employer. Your “home self” would have no idea that your “work self” is suffering within an evil mechanism during eight hours of every day.
One way to escalate this situation at the story’s midpoint would be to play into the main character’s worst fears:
While at home, one of the characters learns that his company’s line of business is morally reprehensible but that if he tries to quit his job, the company will come after his sister and her new baby.
This complication escalates the danger and drama, and it even makes the main character sympathetic (he would do anything to protect his baby niece—what a great guy!). But it also turns a show with a unique premise into every other thriller about a guy who can’t escape his evil overlords (which is a pretty familiar story).
The most unique aspect of Severance is that while at the office, the office workers have no memory of life outside their jobs. Their “home self” is a complete stranger to them. They don’t know if their “home self” has families or hobbies or friends. They don’t even know why they made the drastic decision to sever their memories in the first place. While it’s frightening to realize that you might work for a secretly evil corporation, it’s uniquely frightening not to know what kind of person you are during twelve hours of every day!
Here’s the actual complication introduced at the midpoint of Severance:
The office workers find out there’s a way they can “wake up” outside of the office, which would allow them to essentially escape the office, at least for a short period of time.
If the office workers can pull off this trick, they’ll face their greatest hopes (that they are wonderful people outside of the office, with loving friends and families), and their greatest fears (that they’re callous and lonely and unloved outside of the office). In fact, these hopes and fears can even be seen the other way around—it would be terrible to learn that you’re absolutely happy outside of the office if the version of you that is trapped at work is forever severed from that happiness. Such irony!
Add Another Ironic Twist
Sometimes it helps to think of a plot as having two ironic twists, one at the beginning and one near the midpoint.
One of my favorite ironic hooks is that of the “good ghost.” In any haunted house story, the ghost is supposed to be the terrifying villain, and the humans are the sympathetic victims. Turning that dynamic around gives us a hook like this one:
A recently-deceased couple must haunt their own house in order to chase away the unbearable family who has moved in. (Beetlejuice, Warner Bros.)
When I rewatched this movie recently, I was surprised to find that the first half focuses on the ghostly couple instead of on the titular character, the comic monster who’s the star of the movie’s marketing materials. But there’s something very sweet and funny about Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin coming to grips with the fact that they’re dead and that a very obnoxious couple (including the always-hilarious Catherine O’Hara) has invaded their house. The ghosts’ attempts to scare away these unwelcome inhabitants are really fun because they’re completely ineffectual.
And just before that simple plot starts to get tired, we get a great midpoint complication:
The ghost-couple fail to chase away the family and resort to hiring a malicious spirit to finish the job.
With this new ironic twist, the humans are still the villains and the ghosts are still the victims, but the spirit (Beetlejuice) is now an anti-hero, a disgusting menace we’re forced to root for, at least until he finishes the job and we get to see him banished.
Add A New Facet To Your Theme
Quieter novels with more nuanced situations might not allow for intense escalations. In Lessons by Ian McEwan, the main character is initially the prime suspect in his wife’s disappearance. But Lessons isn’t about the horror of being unjustly blamed for the supposed murder of a loved one—it’s about a man grappling with the long-lasting effects of the abuse he suffered as a boy at the hands of his piano teacher. His wife is soon located and chooses not to return home, and the police never arrest the main character.
The novel’s complications include shifting perceptions of relationships. The wife abandons her husband and baby to write a novel—but the novel is truly brilliant and she might never have written it if she had stayed. The husband remembers how he was hurt by his piano teacher—but also how he sought to continue their relationship, and why. These complications allow for a deeper exploration of theme, because they add new dimensions to the novel’s situation that make easy conclusions impossible (It’s wrong to abandon your family, and it’s wrong to stifle your creative gifts).
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney is another novel with a quiet premise: Two brothers face difficulties in their relationships with each other and with women. Early on, Peter dismisses Ivan’s romantic relationship with an older women, claiming that the woman can only have bad motives for dating Ivan. Later, this idea is given a new dimension when Ivan learns that Peter is dating a much younger woman. Is there a difference between their relationship dynamics just because the sexes are reversed? The situation now moves beyond the simple question, Is it okay for Ivan to date an older woman?, and into more complicated territory now that we have another example of this kind of relationship dynamic. ●
Your Turn
If you’re hoping to add a complication to your novel that ties into your ironic hook, try asking yourself these questions:
How might a skill or advantage that my character enjoys go very wrong near the story’s midpoint?
How can an event at my story’s midpoint force my character to face her biggest fear or admit her greatest weakness?
How might my story’s situation change at the midpoint so that a central dilemma presents no easy answers?
