A draft of the household novel has a middle that runs from the register drawer, about a quarter of the way through the book, to Dov’s chapter at about 78 per cent. By then the reader knows the situation. Four months after their father’s death, three adult children are reconstructing what he left: Elena, who has learned in Dov’s doorway that their mother changed the shop’s locks in March and wants to know why; Nadia, who counts things and has learned not to touch the coat on its hook in the flat above the shop; and Dov, who gave Elena the new key and kept the reason. At the drawer Elena has found the ledger, and seen her father’s hand stop at an entry of 9 March and a looser hand carry on.
The draft’s middle then does this. Elena calls at the locksmith’s to ask who ordered the new locks; he tells her it was her mother and nothing more. Nadia counts the week’s receipts again, and lets Dov’s call ring out. Elena goes back to Dov’s door and asks again, and he tells her it is not his to explain. Nadia goes up to the flat, stands in front of the coat, and comes down without touching it. Elena drives to her mother’s street, parks, and leaves without knocking. Elena comes back to the shop to go on reading and finds the drawer empty, and rings Dov, who says he will explain when he can. Meanwhile, in two sentences of summary, Dov has been talking to an agent about the shop. Then Nadia finds the good pen in the coat’s pocket, at about two-thirds, and the book moves towards its climax.
Every one of these is a scene in the sense The Purposes of a Scene (Chapter 1) gives the word, with a want, resistance and a change. An early reader’s note on the draft still says I lost the thread somewhere after the drawer, and the writer’s first response is to add something: a break-in at the shop, a row at the funeral tea, a new character. Each addition would be another event at the stakes the middle already has, and the reader’s complaint is not that too little happens. It is that the same thing happens. Elena’s sequences end where they began, with a question put and not answered, and Nadia’s end with a refusal kept. By the fourth of them a reader can predict the fifth. What Elena could do at a quarter of the way through (ask Dov, ask her mother, ask someone else, read the ledger) is what she can still do at two-thirds, less the ledger, and nothing has made any of it cost more. The one line of action that could close a door, Dov’s sale, runs off the page and touches no one until the end.
This chapter calls the stretch of a novel between the commitment that ends its beginning and the movement that begins its ending the middle, and its claim is that middles fail by this mechanism far more often than by any shortage of incident.
A middle sags when its events leave the protagonist’s options and their price unchanged, however many events there are; its work is to narrow what the book can still do until the ending is the move that remains, so each sequence in it should close a way forward or raise the cost of one.
The claim has a consequence for revision that runs against instinct. The remedy for a slow middle is seldom more material, and is often less: the household’s draft middle needs no new events, since the sale, the empty drawer and Dov’s silence are already in it. They are in the wrong places and have no effect on anyone. The revision in Worked Analyses moves the sale’s deadline into the sisters’ lives, turns the empty drawer into a decision, and puts a turn at the centre of the book, so that each sequence takes something away from someone. It cuts three of the draft’s sequences, and what it adds, the sale’s deadline and Dov’s request to clear the flat, comes out of the sale the draft already had.
The claim also explains why the middle is the part of a novel that writers most often call the hardest to write. A writer planning a book usually knows how it starts and roughly how it ends, and the middle is drafted as a way of getting from one to the other, so its sequences are written as transit. Transit has no direction of its own: every sequence in it is equally far from the end. This is a judgement from editorial practice rather than a measured finding, but it predicts the household draft’s symptom, a middle whose parts are interchangeable because none of them was written to change what comes after it.
See also: the full treatment, on the middle’s place among the book’s recurring concepts; The Subplot (Chapter 14), for the occupational thread, a subplot given work to keep it present, which is the draft’s treatment of the sale.