Chapter 13: The Midpoint

A Place of Change

This post contains Chapter 13 of The Perfect Crime, my mystery-writing textbook. To read previous chapters, check out the Archive.

Plot Twists aren’t just for the end of your mystery novel. In many a mystery, you’ll see not only a Climactic Plot Twist at the end, but also a Midpoint Plot Twist right around the 50 percent mark. We’re going to talk about what that looks like—but first, we’re going to talk about why you need one.

You’ve probably heard people describe the middles of some books as “saggy.” What do we need to prevent our books from being described in this way? We need a Midpoint, a story beat that I often like to refer to as “A Place of Change,” because, well—that’s what should happen here.

Change is what this beat is all about. If you make it all the way through the middle of your book without any major shake-ups to your characters’ situations, it doesn’t really matter how much drama, conflict, and gunplay you throw at your readers. The book is going to feel a little linear, a little unsurprising. You want to prevent that by making plans for a significant shift to the trajectory of your plot, smack in the middle.

There are lots of ways to shake up the story at the midpoint. You can:

• Change your characters’ environment. Perhaps you’ll take a page from George Lucas, who liked to change the characters’ physical surroundings at the Midpoint—taking them from Jabba’s palace, say, to the forests of Endor. Or maybe at the Midpoint, you’ll force your characters to dive deeper into the special world of your Hook—entering the Vampire world for the first time, or beginning the trial phase of a legal mystery.

• Change your characters’ relationships. At the midpoint, your Sleuth may have to accept a partnership with his greatest adversary in order to move forward on the case. Or perhaps he’ll learn that his greatest friend has betrayed him, and from here on he has to go it alone.

• Raise your characters’ stakes. The Midpoint would be a fine time for your Sleuth to learn that the missing person he is searching for has actually been kidnapped. Or that his client is a mob boss who will kill him if he doesn’t solve the case.

• Accelerate your characters’ timeline. Want to establish a ticking time clock? The Midpoint is the perfect place to do that. Or to pull time off the clock, by allowing the Villain to shorten the timetable.

All of these are great ways to handle the Midpoint, but in mystery fiction, the most common ways to approach it are these: drop a body, or deploy a Midpoint Plot Twist—something that forces the Sleuth to re-examine what they thought they understood about the case.