The Mirror Moment: Why You Should Start Your Novel from the Middle
A summary of James Scott Bell’s #1 Amazon bestselling writing book. How writing one brief monologue will launch your entire novel.
James Scott Bell advertises his short and sweet guidebook as being suitable for both “plotters” who obsessively outline and discovery writers who prefer to fly by the seat of their pants (“pantsers”).
Most of all, Write Your Novel From the Middle feels like a godsend for over-complicators. Prior to reading this guidebook, working on my first novel felt like staring down a 1000-piece puzzle without knowing the trick lies in first identifying the corner pieces.
At 85 pages Write Your Novel From the Middle is the shortest writing book I’ve ever read. It also happens to be the best. Perhaps it’s slightly absurd to summarise a book the thickness—thinness—of a National Geographic; however, I’ve found reviewing every writing book I read to be an incredibly helpful exercise. Hopefully, you’ll find it equally edifying. A disclaimer, however, applies:
Bell stands on the shoulders of giants. Doubtless, it’s helped that playwright Lajos Egri has hammered into me the importance of first defining your premise and then conjuring characters with the strength of will to rise to the challenge promised therein. Further, having finished Will Storr’s moving treatise on the power of storytelling, I well understand both the psychology of the reader and the flawed psyche essential to any believable protagonist.
All told, certain concepts covered by Bell are second nature to me, so their succinct treatment did not faze me, but you might find some sections too brief. Regardless, his treatment of voice, exposition, and how to “show not tell” are tasty morsels, to be sure, but they aren’t the main course he’s serving up.
Speaking of food analogies, I felt I had all the ingredients prepped and sitting in front of me—characters with flaws and goals, a setting, an overarching theme—but I didn’t know how to get cookin’. When the White Rabbit doesn’t know where to begin his tall tale, the King of Wonderland advises him to, “Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end: then stop”.
Turns out, starting at the start is terrible writing advice.
Instead, Bell encourages us to begin with the middle, specifically with your character engaging in a bout of sudden self-reflection. He dubs this the mirror moment. Once you have this brief moment in a scene—not even a scene in its entirety —figured out, the beginning and end of your book will all but write themselves. You see, the mirror moment defines not only your protagonist but your whole book, revealing to you what your story is really about.
The mirror moment
The mirror moment is a brief moment within a scene where the character acknowledges certain home truths, foreshadowing the fears they must face, and the inadequacies they must overcome during the story’s climax. (In stories that are more plot-driven, the character instead takes stock of the seemingly insurmountable odds against them rather than grappling with inner demons. In the best sort of books, the protagonist does both.)
Amusingly enough, the mirror moment often, particularly in the visual shorthand typical to film, occurs in front of an actual mirror or some other reflective surface.
Princess Azula in Avatar: The Last Airbender notices a hair out of place just before her coronation…and perhaps the fact that she’s grown to resemble the mother who saw her as less than perfect, monstrous even. The protagonist of Mean Girls catches sight of her be-glossed reflection in a compact mirror, prompting a shock of “What have I become?” Beth Harmon in The Queen's Gambit hallucinates her mother’s reflection in a rainy window pane, worried she’s inherited her madness in addition to her brilliance. Doubtless, dozens of obvious examples spring to mind.
An infinitely more subtle example of the mirror moment occurs in the horror flick/class satire Parasite (2019). I keep returning to the under-the-coffee table scene where the daughter is first humiliated in front of the Kim family patriarch to justify the believability of his climatic breakdown. In this scene, their upper-crust employers engage in a grotesque sexual roleplay as the occupation and income bracket (complete with the assumed moral laxity—only a cheap woman would wear cheap nylon underwear, after all) of their unwilling eavesdroppers. This warped and deeply unflattering depiction is almost too much for him to bear.
My recollections are foggy, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the son character had a more obvious mirror moment, perhaps scrutinising his appearance while wondering if he could ever fit in with the upper echelons of South Korean society, foreshadowing the dreamy montage at the end.
Detailed example
The first Harry Potter novel is also an example of a more elaborate version of this narrative device. In this first instalment, the boy wizard’s school secrets away the Philosopher’s Stone, an artefact the series villain requires to restore his corporeal form. (It’s referred to as the Sorcerer’s Stone in the US edition, undoubtedly following pressure from the American Alchemists Guild.)
It is at the halfway point that the orphaned titular character encounters a curious mirror that reflects back to him a full family complement; a loving mother, a proud father, and doting grandparents appearing to stand behind him. Harry is later cautioned that what appears in the Mirror of the Erised isn’t real, and only a reflection of the observer’s desires. Nevertheless, he finds himself sneaking out at night to sit for hours to bask in this pleasurable fantasy.
At the climax of the novel, his parents’ murderer tempts him with an offer to join forces, and use the stone to bring his mother and father back to life. As far as Harry knows, this mightn’t be beyond the realms of possibility. The dark wizard, Voldemort, dangles the prospect of power and familial love—doubtless, a hard offer to pass up when you’ve spent most of your childhood neglected—before our hero. However, Harry knows relinquishing the stone would not only put the magical community in jeopardy but also betray his new friends and the confidence of the kindly headmaster.
The book’s climax pits Harry’s moral fortitude against his desire for the happy childhood that has been denied him. Standing in front of the enchanted mirror, he manages to retrieve the stone from inside it by picturing it in his reflection’s pocket. The mirror, sensing that Harry, unlike Voldemort, won’t use the stone for personal gain, gives it over to him. This transformation scene shows Harry growing as a character by symbolically replacing his desire for a family with the noble goal of protecting the Wizarding World.
The protagonist’s exploitable weakness is hinted at from the first moment we are introduced to Harry Potter, a boy living in a spider-filled cupboard under the stairs of his aunt and uncle’s house, dressed in his pampered cousin’s oversized hand-me-downs. With this backstory established, Harry is shown confronting his longing for a family, first during the (literal) mirror moment, and then again at the story’s conclusion, with greater urgency and against a high-stakes backdrop.
The pre-story psychology of the main character is determined by the mirror moment. It is also the mirror moment that hints at the nature of the protagonist’s transformation. The mirror moment sets the stage for the high-stakes climactic scene, where that perennial question “Who am I?” demands an answer, demands action. Thus, in a nutshell, the first Harry Potter book is a story of our hero triumphing over an externalised, grasping evil determined to cheat death, by rising above this temptation himself.
You can doubtless think of many such examples of pivotal mid-points, of linchpin moments of self-reflection. In fact, I encourage you to examine the middle of your favourite books and movies to see if they, too, contain a mirror moment.
How to write your mirror moment
The mirror moment is your launching pad. To write the mirror moment, Bell suggests the time-honoured, unfiltered stream-of-consciousness approach. You’re going to write a “vomit draft”, basically. What will become the mirror moment will start off as a poorly written, ham-handed inner monologue (“Ever since my parent’s divorce I haven’t believed in love, pushing people away before they had a chance to disappoint me, but now I wonder if…”). An inner monologue of this hamfisted kind likely won’t make it into the final draft, but it’s an effective way of exploring the thematically-relevant issues plaguing your protagonist, nonetheless.
Bell promises a clarity of purpose will follow as soon as you determine what your character’s mirror moment will explore, if not the specifics of how you will communicate this to the reader. Whether it’s a tear shed over a family photo, a drunken confession spoken into the bottom of a glass, a misperception through a warped window pane, reading one’s prematurely printed obituary, or indeed that cliche of catching sight of their overly coiffed or dishevelled reflection, how your character experiences their mirror moment can be decided late in the game.
The golden triangle
The mirror moment sits at the apex of what Bell terms the golden triangle, containing the beginning of your novel, specifically, the pre-story psychology, and the transformation scene occurring at its denouement. Presumably, we are encouraged to envisage a planar mirror bisecting the triangle down the middle, uniting two halves of a thematically-sound whole.
The pre-story psychology is your character’s well-thought-out and organic backstory, which explains how your character came to be who they are. This is what your protagonist dwells upon at the halfway point— their nature, their past mistakes, present-day limitations, and their tentative hopes for the future. Who are they? They do not really know. Are they capable of becoming more? That remains to be seen.
If your protagonist does have the strength to overcome the obstacles — internal and external—in their way, this will occur in the transformation scene. Your protagonist’s transformation must be a highly visible one, it cannot just occur in your character’s head, or it will ring false. You must furnish readers with proof. Your protagonist must sacrifice themselves by diving into a giant furnace, suicide in the Seine, blow off an important meeting for their son’s baseball game, or declare their undying love while being hauled off by airport security.
By the way, because all three elements are inextricably linked, you can start at any point in the triangle as long as you have an idea of what your character’s moment of soul-searching and self-doubt is all about. Remember, it is the mirror moment that pulls the threads of the narrative together.
Death stakes
Bell also talks about the importance of high-stakes, dramatically referring to them as death stakes. The “death” need not be literal, it could be the loss of reputation or of a relationship. For readers to care about your character’s journey, there must be a looming threat of a “physical, professional or psychological death”. Importantly, it should be a threat your character ignores at their peril. As the adage goes, a problem your character can walk away from is a book your reader will walk away from.
In conclusion
Write Your Novel From the Middle is chock-a-block with useful tips, including a dessert course titled Secrets of a Page Turner, reconnecting the aspiring writer with what they adore about literature, and reminding them why they’re writing a novel in the first place. There’s also talk of pillars and arcs and even metaphorical suspension bridges—things which I find incredibly tedious, much as I recognise the importance of structure. The point is, it’s all there. Anyway, what are you waiting for? Get your grubby mitts on:
Bell, J. S. (2014). Write Your Novel from the Middle: A New Approach for Plotters, Pantsers and Everyone in Between. Compendium Press.
Or subscribe to show your support:
Till next time :)