Question – traditional middle novels

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The phrase is one I’ve seen a few times in the last week or two, and is an ongoing preoccupation with lots of reviewers. As someone who’s had it thrown out by some for either books 2 or 3, I’m wondering whether book 4 will be seen as part of the middle or the end, but mainly I’m wondering what people are looking for from those novels. Do people have some sort of venn diagram in their head with self-contained plots on one side and pieces of an ongoing series plot on the other? You’d hope not, but there must be some sort of value judgement in what they’re looking for.

My memories of George Martin’s books are a little vague these days, but while the plot of each book blurs into the other in my mind, I don’t care about that at all – they’re good books, but is that a permissible exception if you’re just really good at what you do? For preference I’d say Steven Erikson’s books could be less disjointed/separate, sequential books often bearing no relation to each other whatsoever, but I think it’s one of the most stunning projects in any style of fiction so std rules might not apply here!

My question is – can anyone think of who does the middle novel well? And which ones did it badly and why?

10 thoughts on “Question – traditional middle novels”

  1. I think it does depend on how you are approaching the series. It’s also a big preoccupation for Tad Williams, who’s mentioned how hard he finds it to write ‘middle books’ (even moreso when he had two to write for the OTHERLAND series).

    Martin, Tolkien and maybe a few other writers have a different approach because the divisions into smaller volumes fell after writing most or all of their work (the first three ASoIaF books were supposed to be one book, and Martin was deep into writing what is now A CLASH OF KINGS before he realised it was much too long to be one book and dividing it in three; similarly the division between A CLASH OF KINGS and A STORM OF SWORDS came when work was well-advancedon the latter). So for those writers their works really are one massive story divided, sometimes almost arbritrarily, into smaller ones. Williams is in the same boat except he had break-points planned ahead of time (Bakker as well for that matter). Rothfuss is an interesting one as his most basic draft of his trilogy was completed before Book 1 was published, but he has now had to rewrite and re-edit the individual books to such a degree that he knows clearly where the break points between the books are.

    Erikson’s approach is to make each book as self-contained as humanly possible with the continuing elements between books developed only as subplots in the first half of the series and then switching to more prominent, serialised elements in the second half. Since I don’t think the second half of the MALAZAN series is anywhere near as good as the first, I’m not sure how successful this approach was. I believe this is also Scott Lynch’s approach, with the first few GENTLEMAN BASTARD books supposed to be more or less self-contained capers before switching to a bigger, continuing story later.

    Returning to the question, I guess it just depends on how you approach the story. One big story with nothing really self-contained in each volume is a good way to go if the story is big and good enough to sustain it, self-contained volumes with continuing elements also works if the stories are good enough to sustain it. Despite occasional reviewers’ delusions to the contrary (most notably SFX Magazine in its crazy decision to give Books 10 and 11 of THE WHEEL OF TIME to people unfamiliar with the series to review, which is ridiculous), most readers do start with Book 1 of a series, so the degree to which the books are serialised or self-contained is ultimately not that big a deal.

    1. Reading book 10 of TWOT without the previous volumes?! That’s one of the dumbest things I’ve heard in a while…

      Will be interesting to see how Rothfuss does, yes – now that he must have rewritten almost every sentence in the book by now. Bakker’s a good one to mention, while there was something that didn’t quite work for me in the series there books did clearly have the structure in place with the break points, but the plot’s still a more ongoing one that Scott Lynch is aiming for.

  2. I think it does depend on how you are approaching the series. It’s also a big preoccupation for Tad Williams, who’s mentioned how hard he finds it to write ‘middle books’ (even moreso when he had two to write for the OTHERLAND series).

    Martin, Tolkien and maybe a few other writers have a different approach because the divisions into smaller volumes fell after writing most or all of their work (the first three ASoIaF books were supposed to be one book, and Martin was deep into writing what is now A CLASH OF KINGS before he realised it was much too long to be one book and dividing it in three; similarly the division between A CLASH OF KINGS and A STORM OF SWORDS came when work was well-advancedon the latter). So for those writers their works really are one massive story divided, sometimes almost arbritrarily, into smaller ones. Williams is in the same boat except he had break-points planned ahead of time (Bakker as well for that matter). Rothfuss is an interesting one as his most basic draft of his trilogy was completed before Book 1 was published, but he has now had to rewrite and re-edit the individual books to such a degree that he knows clearly where the break points between the books are.

    Erikson’s approach is to make each book as self-contained as humanly possible with the continuing elements between books developed only as subplots in the first half of the series and then switching to more prominent, serialised elements in the second half. Since I don’t think the second half of the MALAZAN series is anywhere near as good as the first, I’m not sure how successful this approach was. I believe this is also Scott Lynch’s approach, with the first few GENTLEMAN BASTARD books supposed to be more or less self-contained capers before switching to a bigger, continuing story later.

    Returning to the question, I guess it just depends on how you approach the story. One big story with nothing really self-contained in each volume is a good way to go if the story is big and good enough to sustain it, self-contained volumes with continuing elements also works if the stories are good enough to sustain it. Despite occasional reviewers’ delusions to the contrary (most notably SFX Magazine in its crazy decision to give Books 10 and 11 of THE WHEEL OF TIME to people unfamiliar with the series to review, which is ridiculous), most readers do start with Book 1 of a series, so the degree to which the books are serialised or self-contained is ultimately not that big a deal.

    1. Reading book 10 of TWOT without the previous volumes?! That’s one of the dumbest things I’ve heard in a while…

      Will be interesting to see how Rothfuss does, yes – now that he must have rewritten almost every sentence in the book by now. Bakker’s a good one to mention, while there was something that didn’t quite work for me in the series there books did clearly have the structure in place with the break points, but the plot’s still a more ongoing one that Scott Lynch is aiming for.

  3. I would say Andrzej Sapkowski. Despite the fact that I don’t really like longer stories, he was able to keep my attention for five books (well, seven, if you count the short-stories books). That is because he can write character like nobody else and even the “evil” ones are so interesting, that you really care about their future. You read page after page and the time just passes by. Not sure if The Witcher was translated to english, but this one is definitely a “must-read” one.

    1. If it is, I suspect my publisher will be the one doing it so once I’ve bought more bookcases at my new house, I’ll have to send off a long request list! Cheers for the suggestion!

  4. I would say Andrzej Sapkowski. Despite the fact that I don’t really like longer stories, he was able to keep my attention for five books (well, seven, if you count the short-stories books). That is because he can write character like nobody else and even the “evil” ones are so interesting, that you really care about their future. You read page after page and the time just passes by. Not sure if The Witcher was translated to english, but this one is definitely a “must-read” one.

    1. If it is, I suspect my publisher will be the one doing it so once I’ve bought more bookcases at my new house, I’ll have to send off a long request list! Cheers for the suggestion!

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