In this week’s episode, JP and Crys continue their Author’s Tarot Journey, this time using the card The Wheel of Fortune to guide their discussion. They discuss the different methods they use to write the midpoint of their story and how midpoints vary across genres.
Question of the week: What tools do you use to reach your midpoint? Share your answer here.
Show Notes
Write Your Novel From The Middle by James Scott Bell
Transcript
Crys: Hello, friends and welcome to the Write Away Podcast. It is June 2nd, 2022 as we are recording. I’m Crys Cain with my cohost…
JP: JP Rindfleisch.
Crys: How has your writing week been, JP?
JP: So this is a couple of days after the Memorial day weekend. We had family over, and let me tell ya, I can’t do a whole lot when there’s family over. So quote unquote, not well, but still progressing forward. So is what it is, and I am back at it, trying to wake myself up at five in the morning and it’s doing its thing.
Crys: One of the benefits of living in a different country than you grew up in is not that you get to celebrate holidays from both countries, it’s that you get to forget holidays from both countries.
JP: Ooh.
Crys: And then just work extra.
JP: That sounds nice. I’m not going to complain because of course, like love having family over, but I have this like weird need to make sure that everyone is entertained in some meaningful way. And everyone, except for my partner, wakes up super early. So it was like, oh, I’ll get up at five… Everyone got up at five. And I’m like, what are you doing? You guys need to go back to sleep. It’s just, it was a weird time. So I just kinda tried to do businessy stuff because I couldn’t get the words in, so I tried to do something, but yeah, it was interesting.
Crys: Yeah. When I host people, from after seven o’clock I am always like glaring at their door like, how do they sleep this long? They get up nine which is like a normal vacation time. And I’m like, dude, how do you live?
JP: That would have been nice. But yeah, that didn’t happen that way. How has your writing week been?
Crys: I definitely got more writing done this week after my recognition last week of one of the things that’s been going on and slowing me down. I did have to push off the co-writing romance. My co-writer went back into the hospital, and so I pushed the pre-order date back one month, which you can do once on Amazon KDP for every book. So now we’re on the real deadline now, unless I decide to cancel the pre-order, which I really don’t want to do cause that’s good money. But I don’t think I’ll have any trouble getting it done, even if she’s not able to contribute. Now that there’s a real deadline, my brain is like, we get things done with deadlines. But it’s stressful and I don’t like stress, so I don’t do them generally.
What else? I should be getting my German translation back. I might already have it back. I haven’t looked in my folder, but I also haven’t heard from the translators since Saturday or Sunday. And I’ve put out a job listing to find a proofreader for that. And I’ve already contacted the original cover artist so that she can just update it. So I’m getting all of that ready, and I will probably not release that until the beginning of next month. And then hopefully like I’ll have a system in place where I can happily set the pre-order up for the next book, which should be also done in a month, so that I can just consistently have the pre-order listed in the back of the eBook and ready to roll every time. That’s the hope. So I’m really excited about that. Yeah, that’s where I am at right now.
JP: That is exciting.
Crys: Excellent. Okay. So for our inspiration card today, we have the Wheel of Fortune, which honestly is just often one of the funnest cards to look at in most Tarot decks. Artists tend to have a really fun time with it. So would you describe the Wheel of Fortune, JP?
JP: Yeah, it’s a wild card. So upright, Wheel of Fortune is good luck, karma, life cycles, destiny, and a turning point. And reversed, it’s bad luck, resistance to change, and breaking cycles. Wheel of Fortune is actually in the major Arcana, farthest away from both the fool and the world. So if we think of tarot as a big circle, this is like the midpoint, it’s the top of the circle. And it represents a giant wheel, it has three figures on the outer edge.
Those figures are the Egyptian God Typhon, the God of Evil, on the left side. And then it has Anubis, the God of the Dead, welcoming souls to underworld. And then it has a Sphinx at the top representing knowledge and strength. And it has Zodiac angels on the corners of it representing different things. It’s very like symbolic. And ultimately this is a card that represents a potential. Are we going to go towards side of like good things or bad things? It’s that luck card in the middle of one’s journey.
Crys: Excellent. And the question that we have used this card to inspire is: how do you write the midpoint of your story? And as we were talking about the question this morning, I was like, do you have specific thoughts on midpoints, JP? You said yes, so I’m going to make first.
JP: Yeah. So we read the book and did the book club for Writing From the Middle. And in there it talked a lot about how the midpoint is a death point. You have these three phases, the physical, psychological, I can’t remember the third one, but ultimately it’s a death for a character. And I started to think about that and I was wondering like, is this always true?
Then I was thinking about this whole Wheel of Fortune card where you have both good luck and bad luck. And I’m wondering if it’s not only like death at the midpoint, but it could be a rebirth at the midpoint. so then I was trying to think of movies because they’re the fastest thing to think through midpoints, and that’s where I came across movies like Mulan.
In Mulan, the midpoint is actually in the poll where they’re all trying to get up to the top of it and they have this whole montage of them failing, and then Mulan finally realizes how to get to the top of it. And she becomes like this rebirth character where she knows she’s at the top of her game by the midpoint. So that’s not really a death moment, and so then that got me thinking, like, how do you write these good midpoints? It’s not just a quote unquote death moment, but it could be a rebirth moment.
It’s really just a turning point. It’s a point where a character believes either they’re at their ultimate low or they’re at their ultimate high, but it’s a false flag because we will get to worse things later. But yeah, that was where my thoughts were about this is death and rebirth.
Crys: Yeah, and I really liked the book Writing From the Middle. It gave me lots of really good ideas, but I find that I don’t use it in my romance, which is super fluffy for the most part. There’s rarely any conflict between the main characters that isn’t quickly solved, and that’s the brand.
The conflict is all external, and there’s a mission, and it doesn’t follow a lot of the traditional up and down moments. And I think that there is a slight difference between fluffy and cozy, which are two separate kind of feels, that doesn’t always follow along with our traditional, more adventurey midpoints or emotionally like deep, emotional range books.
When you go for a cozy or a fluffy book, it’s like eating a giant bowl of mashed potatoes by itself. You’re not looking for variety. You’re looking to just submerse yourself in one sensation, in a way. And as I try and think, like what the midpoint in most of my books is without going and researching my own work, I’m not really sure what that would be. And I’m really curious about that.
JP: I wonder if, because you’re more in this realm of like cozy, that’s where things like the death moment doesn’t apply and it is like a rebirth or a shift of a different sense. It’s really hard trying to find movies that the mid-point isn’t like death, but I think that it exists.
And like there was a movie, The Big Sick, I think it was on Amazon. And this one, it’s basically these two characters, it’s like a romantic comedy. and I believe that the Woman’s mom not a fan of the male character. She’s kind of racist if I remember correctly. And there’s a point where this character is getting heckled and then this mom protects him, and that’s a shift. It’s a moment she becomes this ally or this mentor where she was originally like an antagonist. think that would be a midpoint where it’s not a death moment, but that’s actually like giving a character ability to shift into a different role. I think that is also a good utilization of a midpoint.
Crys: Yeah. And I want to clarify for anyone listening, for like the idea of cozy, I’m not specifically referring to cozy mysteries. Cause cozy mysteries often do have the death point because a lot of them are concerned with murder. So there’s often like a second murder in a very literal death point at about the midpoint point of the book. But often it’s something else goes missing, something else’s lost.
And I’m nearing what will be about the midpoint of the book I’m currently working on. And what will happen at this midpoint is that a decision is made basically affirming of beliefs. So there’s kids in danger and a whole like three different groups have realized that they’re all after the same bad guy. And so there’ll be like some kind of statement of like, regardless of what we have to do, like the kids are the most important thing and we’ll do whatever we can to protect them.
That’s one of the things that James Scott Bell, who wrote Writing From the Middle, said about running from the middle, is that everyone does it instinctively if it’s a good book. And I think that’s mostly true, but I do question for books that have more slice of life, that are more fluffy, that still satisfy that particular reader’s emotional need, how often that’s strictly true?
JP: Yeah, I think it’s the whole death part, like Not always the case. And so what you’re talking about, that’s still a shift. And when you talk about midpoints, it’s all about a shift to change a perspective, a change of different whatnot. Easiest shift to do is death, but in Your Case, it’s almost like a shifting of roles or a mentality, from before we were all against each other or something along those lines, and now we’ve shifted to focus on a different thing. I think that’s just as applicable as a midpoint. Especially when you consider the Wheel of Fortune and all of little pieces.
Crys: Now I’m going to be like overanalyzing everything I write. Again, which is normal. But what question do we want to ask our listeners this week, JP?
JP: I want to know how they approach the midpoint. What tools do they use? What do they think about, or what do they come back to realize that is part of their writing that they don’t think about? I want to see how they write their midpoints, how they approach it.
Crys: Excellent. All right, friends, we were about to go record our Patreon only episode, which is our business episode inspired by the Wheel of Fortune. And this week we’ll be talking about how do you deal with sudden changes in productivity and blocks. And if you would like to have access to that episode and all of our Patreon episodes, you can check us out at patreon.com/writeawaypodcast.
Thank you so much for joining us this week.
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