Overcoming the Dreaded Middle Book Syndrome in Trilogies
Ah, the legendary Middle Book Syndrome. If you’ve been in bookish circles for even a small amount of time, you’ve likely heard this term, used often to describe the second book of a trilogy. Readers bemoan it. Writers fear it. “This suffered from Middle Book Syndrome” is a phrase to accompany complaints that there was no point to the installment: nothing happened, the characters went in circles, the plot only served to get to the third book.
(Keeping the Story Straight in a Novel or Series.)
Like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, this phrase stood in the corner of my apartment when I started to outline Vilest Things, the middle book of the Flesh & False Gods trilogy. Before I approached this critical juncture, I needed to do a deep dive into what exactly the term Middle Book Syndrome serves to critique, knowing too well the many, many thoughts I personally had about all the trilogies I’ve read and the varying ways in which the second book improved or harmed the overall structure.
My favorite trilogies are the ones where it feels as though the series is expanding outward in a triangular shape:
Book 1 is the smallest end: It’s the snippet of the world we get while we’re still getting our feet wet. The scope should be a very intentional effort on the author’s part, small not because they’ve only thought up this much so far, but small because this is what is immediately relevant while we encounter our first obstacle in the series. Book 2 starts to expand. It takes what we learned already in the smallest part of the triangle and grows in every direction, which includes character, world-building, and plot. Book 2 has to change the stakes. It has to run with what we know and take us elsewhere. Only then does it feel like an expansive transition into Book 3, the widest segment of the triangle. If Book 3 is that gargantuan finale involving the largest bite of the world, the balancing act of the entire trilogy actually depends on Book 2 to get us there.
Once I started thinking about a trilogy as something that had that triangular shape, I felt like I could understand more clearly what it was about some middle books that make them unsatisfying. Generally, they can’t be thought about as separate installments. There are exceptions, of course, depending on what the author has set out to achieve throughout the course of their trilogy. However, in the general structure we see for trilogies, and particularly trilogies in the SFF space, there is a steady growth of stakes, and steady character development that takes our protagonists onto a journey where they should end in a very different place to where they started, whether that’s a jaded worldview or having seen the truth of their idealism in the beginning.
In Immortal Longings, I started with three aristocratic characters who had it in their heads that they could be the ones to invoke change. Calla wants revenge: Though it is selfish and borne of her own anger, she figures she’s doing the kingdom a favor by getting rid of a tyrant king. Anton wants money: Though he’s trying to save his first love, the truth is that his motive is more about holding onto someone who needs him rather than acting out of devotion. And August wants the throne: He has decided he will be better than his adoptive father. He is not.
This is a series inspired by Shakespeare’s Antony & Cleopatra, so I figure my readers know that there is a tragedy arc impending. Book 1 to Book 2 to Book 3 needs to follow a descent. Every new plot development brings a point of no return. Calla is given choices that force her to acknowledge she isn’t acting out of selfless behavior—she wants power when it lands in her lap. Anton is put in front of options that make it clearer and clearer he will flit where he is needed, and this priority of his emerges as his fatal flaw. And August—really, August’s arc is more about the people around him, and what it will take before they’re willing to acknowledge who he is. In planning Book 2, I was thinking deeply about what exactly it meant to “progress” through these arcs. You can’t reach the end quite yet, since that’s reserved for Book 3. But you can’t be going in circles either.
So often the dreaded Middle Book Syndrome emerges in the need to use up page time without deepening the stakes. Instead of a triangle, there are two large rectangles and a thin bridge between them. If you just removed the thin bridge and pushed the rectangles together, they would fit together quite nicely and you could walk through the space without any gaps. Which is a fanciful way to say that nothing fundamental changed about the shape of the story between Book 1 and Book 3, so Book 2 feels “unnecessary.” The middle book may have introduced new stakes, looped around to defeat it, and everyone ends back where they started so that we can get going into the conclusion.
What makes it a triangle and not two rectangles with a drawbridge, then? For Vilest Things, I set out on a mission to decide every major shift in the status quo between the start of Book 2 and the end of Book 2 before I wrote a word of the draft. Whose relationships have irrevocably shifted? Which alliances have broken to the point of no return, and which alliances are cemented so that it would take a tremendous shift to shake them apart in Book 3? What do the characters believe on the last page? What have the characters changed their minds about, what have they accepted about themselves, and furthermore what are they still deluding themselves about?
Without spoiling Vilest Things, I do have to say that the final event was my absolute favorite scene to write, because it was such a point of no return that my triangle expanded enormously and I may be setting up trouble for myself to follow Book 3 with kingdom-wide conflict… (And that’s a problem for Future Me when outlining Book 3!)
Check out Chloe Gong’s Vilest Things here:
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As always, there is nuance when it comes to Middle Book Syndrome and the characteristics it gets conflated with. Some of my favorite Book 2s in trilogies are termed useless middle books by people on the Internet and when I sit back to think about it, I figure they’ve just equated slower character moments with “nothing happening.” Reading is subjective, after all—there are books where some readers will dub heinously slow-paced and a different reader will go through the same 300 pages and decide it was too fast-paced and there wasn’t time to understand anything.
To counteract Middle Book Syndrome I find that it’s more effective to think about the structural flaws that it critiques: the tendency of a series to do the same thing across its installments and not let the trilogy grow and expand. Otherwise, the middle book is the time where we don’t need the introductory pace of Book 1 nor the conclusive tone of Book 3. It can and should be a time where we luxuriate with who the characters are, and who they can be pushed to be.
Being the middle book doesn’t need to be a mark against the story—I had the time of my life writing Vilest Things knowing that it was exactly when I could make five thousand things explode and still have the time in Book 3 to address it.
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