Reader Question: What about mid-points?

From Jacqueline Windh:

What about mid-points?

I feel like I have got a really good handle on the Three-Act structure, and the two main turning points that take us from one act to the next — both timing of them, and what they should do or achieve.

But I feel a bit muddled about mid-points. It seems some films have them, some don’t. Sometimes viewers/readers may disagree about exact which plot point actually was the mid-point. Sometimes the supposed mid-point is not really near the middle at all.

There are mid-points… and there are mid-points. Lots of them in the structure of almost any narrative form, especially so in a screenplay:

* Act Two: The entirety of the second act — what Aristotle calls the “middle” — represents the vast gray area between the Old World where characters lived in their lives leading up to FADE IN, and the events in the New World heading toward the conclusion of the story. In classical music, this middle part of sonata form is called Development, and it’s where the composer takes melodic themes established in the Beginning [Exposition], then switches keys, chops up the melodies into bits and pieces, plays them off against other, in other words explores multiple possibilities. The same with a screenplay where the Plotline thrusts a Protagonist and other characters into challenging situations which force them to react, twists things around, and often go through some sort of metamorphosis.

* Transition: What I think you are talking about specifically is the classic mid-point of the story, what I call Transition. If you think about a story as a psychological journey, the first half of Act Two generally translates into events that Deconstruct the Protagonist, that is how they had been living in the Old World, those patterns of behavior, belief systems, defensive mechanisms, coping skills all get knocked around in this New World. The upside to this is the stuff of their Authentic Self is now free to bubble up to the Protagonist’s consciousness. The Transition is often a major Plotline point where the Protagonist confronts an obstacle and instead of relying on their old inauthentic ways of behavior, they act based upon the stuff of their Core Essence. That is an empowering experience and transitions their psychological journey from Deconstruction to Reconstruction where they begin to build a new persona based on their Authentic Nature.

* Act One mid-point: After some sort of Opening and before the events that propel the Protagonist out of the Old World and into the New World of adventure, we often find a Plotline point that kicks off the story. A herald arrives with a message. An event occurs that jolts the status quo. A call to adventure. The Protagonist may be tempted to avoid taking on the challenge for it represents change which is inherently unknown and thus fraught with peril, however for a story to be a story, inevitably the Protagonist must plunge ahead. In my language, this Act One mid-point is The Hook, an event that hooks into the Plotline and spins it in a significant way, something that also hooks the reader’s imagination as to what the story may become.

* Act Three mid-point: Generally the Protagonist begins the third act on the defensive as a result of suffering a major blow in the pursuit of their goal at the end of Act Two [what I call All Is Lost]. Then they summon up their courage and relying on their increasing connection with their Inner Self, they push forward. The mid-point is directly before the Final Struggle, right at its front edge, that final moment where the Protagonist can choose to go ahead or turn back.

* Every scene’s mid-point: It’s the second question I ask when I conceive and craft a scene: “What is the scene’s Beginning, Middle and End?” The middle echoes the same spirit of Act Two, the gray area between the staring point and the end point. Each scene is a mini-narrative and the middle is crucial in exploring how events in the External World and Internal World shift, sometimes subtly, sometimes convincingly.

So the short answer to your question is what I refer to as the Transition and perhaps the reason you may have found this confusing is you haven’t been focused enough on the psychological and emotional journey of the Protagonist. If yours is a story where the Protagonist goes through a metamorphosis [not all stories have this dynamic, but most do], the mid-point is where they stop resisting their psyche’s call to embrace their Authentic Self and start to open themselves to it.

The larger answer is that there are lots of middles / mid-points throughout a script, and psychologically each is important as they create moments whereby things are up for grabs, the tectonic plates of relationships are shifting, characters and events in flux. That is a critical aspect of the ongoing flow of tension-release / confusion-resolution that constitutes the emotional guts of a story.

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