It’s just a fact. The middle of a story drags when you’re writing it. The rush of adrenaline, excitement, and optimism of the beginning is past. The thrill of the ending is yet to come. And you find yourself stuck in between the two, with inspiration low and enthusiasm waning. I’ve found myself there often enough. It happens to everyone. About this point you start to have doubts, if you haven’t already. Your story is stupid, the writing is bad, the characters are flat, the plot is boring, and you have all these random threads going everywhere and no idea how you’re going to pull them together to a smashing finale.
So, what to do?
First, keep writing. No matter what. It’s okay to take a break for a while, but if you leave for long you’ll never come back to it. Even if it’s just a sentence or two a day, at least you’ll be making progress, even if it’s forced. Don’t pay attention to how bad it may sound or how much you may dislike it. You can fix all of that later. Just keep things moving, or the story will go stagnant and stale. As long as you keep plodding on, you’ll eventually come to a place that you can be excited about writing again.
Second, don’t ramble on. I tend to do this a lot in my writing. I’m not sure where to go, so I muddle around and poke at different ideas and let the pages of useless, unneeded, boring prose stack one upon the other. That isn’t moving forward. The trick is to keep the story fresh and interesting, rather than letting it go limp and lifeless and die, which is far too easy in the middle stages. There needs to be motion, there needs to be something happening. If there isn’t, make something happen. Do something unexpected or new. Throw a new character into the mix. Toss a random roadblock or unforeseen problem into your unsuspecting characters’ path. Kill somebody off. Make things difficult for them. Just do something. Try to plan out clear, ordered events that lead somewhere if it helps, or if you’re more of a spur of the moment writer pick something random, interesting, and full of doom for your characters and chuck it at them as hard as you can. It’s more fun than it sounds, I promise.
Third, consider skipping some of the parts that may be boring you if you know where you want to wind up. I say this one with caution, because sometimes you don’t go back to parts you’ve skipped. You have to know what kind of writer you are. Personally, when I skip parts more often than not I never go back to fill them in. I’ve only ever filled in a skipped part once, and that only because I had a deadline to meet. (Deadlines and word goals, by the way, are amazing tools to help you get past the middle of your story. Particularly if you have someone to hold you accountable for said deadlines and goals.) So if you know you’ll go back and you think it might help, skip part of your story and move on.
Finally, you might want to reread some of what you’ve written and try to take a fresh look at where you’re going. Do you have a particular place in mind that you want to end up? If not, it might be a good idea to think of one and aim for that, to give yourself direction and purpose. Are you bored writing your story at this point? If so, readers would probably be bored reading it, and you might need to take the story in a new direction or do something to revive it. Try to keep it on track, not wandering off in random directions where it might bog down and never get back up.
As always, published books are a great place to see how others have done it. If it helps pick up one of your favorite books, flip to the middle sections, and see what that author did to keep the story riveting and moving in the middle.
No comments:
Post a Comment