Show Notes

• Sophomore Album





• Fractal Plotting





• The Well of Ascension





• Movement





• Three-Act Structure





• The Bone Shard Daughter





• Mass Effect

Transcript

Generously transcribed by Arturo. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.

Bunny: You’re listening to the Mythcreants Podcast, with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.

Bunny:  Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I’m Bunny. And with me today is…

Chris: Chris.

Bunny: … and…

Oren: Oren.

Bunny: Today we’re talking about middle books, which have a couple issues unique to them, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. So, for instance, they’re easily angered and they’re more likely than other books in a series to become delinquents. They also often feel pretty neglected compared to the first and last books.

Chris: Do they?

Oren: The first book is the one that everyone has high expectations for, and then the last, youngest one is the baby. So, yeah, the middle books, they have some issues to work out.

Bunny: They have to fight for attention, which is something that is true of both middle children and middle books, which I realized when setting up this joke.

Chris: Instead of either middle children or middle books. I have to say: people get way into birth order discourse.

Bunny: They do. I was looking at middle child stereotypes and people go quite far down that pathway.

Oren: If we’re not categorizing ourselves by birth order, what is even the point, I would say. Do we even have an identity at that point?

Bunny: I love when they conflict, where it’s like, “They’re quick to anger and to provoke their siblings, and then it’s like, “They’re peacekeepers.” Okay, if they’re both, then they’re just, like, a person, and sometimes they’re angry and sometimes they’re peacekeepers.

Chris: Maybe we should start giving book astrological readings.

Oren: Whoa!

Bunny: Ooh!

Chris: Based on the day you started the project. Actually, I would not be surprised if some writers waited until an auspicious astrological day to start writing a new book.

Bunny: That has to exist.

Oren: That’s such a Pisces thing to do. I’ve never heard anyone say, “That’s such a Pisces thing to do.” As a Pisces, I feel left out. It’s always like, “Oh, that’s such a Virgo.” “That’s such a Leo thing to do.” No one cares about Pisces, is my point.

Bunny: Hey, it’s better than everyone only having bad things to say about Gemini, which is my issue. “You’re two-faced and pretty evil” and, okay, thanks. I was just born in May. And if we’re talking about the actual star alignments, I’m actually a Taurus, but let’s not broach that debate. So, yeah, we’re talking about the second books in series. Specifically in trilogies, the middle book. It’s the sophomore effort, the difficult second album, the middle child of the book world. And as it turns out, they are pretty often neglected.

Chris: The book that often does not open the series or end it. Therefore, what is it even for? What do you do in middle book?

Bunny: It’s middle books all the way down.

Chris: Yeah, it goes deep, man. And they all get your hand-me-downs.

Oren: What do you do in the middle of a single book, for that matter? It’s all connected. It’s all fractals.

Bunny: I feel like it’s pretty uncommon for me nowadays to see just a pair of books. I don’t know if this is just the circles of books I’ve been reading, because maybe spec fic is especially apt to being divided into three, but usually what I see are either standalones, trilogies, or long series. I can’t off the top of my head think of a complete pair of two books.

Chris: There are duologies. At the same time, I do wonder if traditional publishers encourage the trilogy by frequently doing three-book deals.

Oren: I don’t know to what extent publishers want trilogies. I do know that authors think publishers want trilogies. This is one of those things where it’s often really hard to read what publishers actually want. They’re not really open about it, and you have to scoot around the edges and try to find people who work in the publishing industry and are willing to talk on their podcasts. It’s hard to say, but it’s pretty easy to tell that writers think that publishers want trilogies. So that certainly influences it a little bit, at least.

Bunny: At least we seem to be done with that thing where you make a movie trilogy, but you split the last one into two. I haven’t seen that in a while. That was kind of the teen dystopia symptom, came along with that.

Chris: I’m sure as soon as we have a super profitable adaptation of a really big IP into a series of movies, that will happen again.

Oren: Honestly, we’re overdue for a big romantasy adaptation. I’m surprised that hasn’t happened yet.

Bunny: Don’t speak it into existence. It’s gonna be Fourth Wing or something.

Oren: It’s gonna; there’s so much money there. What are you talking about?

Chris: That’s true. It’s true. It’s probably grinding through the Hollywood meat processing plant at the moment.

Chris: I would watch that instead of another MCU movie, especially since the very samey first-person narration that every romantasy seems to have would not… probably not be that present In a movie.

Bunny: That’s true; that would make it a lot more tolerable, at least for me. So I do think that middle books have some issues unique to them and not to the first and final books in a trilogy. I just read the second Mistborn book, and boy, did it have some Middle Book Syndrome. I think they have a couple particular challenges. In each book, you want to have a complete arc. You want to have the beginning, middle, and end, and the first book usually does that well, but then the second book, it doesn’t always do that well, but it seems like the first book, it does the resolution better than the second book. The second book is often there to build to the third book, which means it can’t resolve too much, especially if the series isn’t planned out in advance. That’s a huge issue.

Chris: Actually, I would say the problem with middle books is that an arc doesn’t have a beginning, middle, and end. I think that is an oversimplification that comes from Aristotle, and then Syd Field just repeating that over and over again. But an arc has basically a beginning, and then if it’s a tension arc, an end that’s a turning point resolution that usually comes pretty close together. And then it’s like we don’t know what to do with the middle. And the answer is more arcs, more smaller arcs. A lot of times that’s very nebulous. A lot of different things can go there, and so that doesn’t give the middle in the series as much of an identity and doesn’t leave people to know what they should put there.

Oren: Well, from a practical standpoint, especially for less established authors, when you’re writing the first book, you want it to be as engaging as possible. So you bring out all the big guns as early as you can. You’ve got coolest villain and your cool powers, and you don’t want to save cool stuff for later, because there might not be a later. You don’t know. And then you get to, “Oh, this was reasonably successful; I should do another one.” And what is there left to do? I have encountered a number of books that seem to have that problem where it kind of feels like you wrapped ever