The Muddle in the Middle is Real

And I almost got stuck in it

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Stuck in the mud: how you feel when you’re in the muddle in the middle. Photo by Mike Erskine on Unsplash

You’re making good progress on your WIP novel. It’s going great! You’ve got an engrossing start written and you know your ending is going to be hella-satisfying to readers. You’re writing steadily. And suddenly you hit it….that dreaded and feared place so many have told you about…and now you see why. You falter. Your words don’t come as naturally. They don’t feel as good as they did a few chapters earlier. When you do hit a writing streak, you later realize it’s taken you off on a tangent that goes nowhere. Or at least not anywhere any reader wants to go. You flail. You flounder. And finally you stop writing.

Congratulations!

You’ve reached the muddle in the middle.

This means: A. you’re halfway through the beast, and B. you’re human. Or at least a writer, which is, granted, an odd sub-species of humanness.

Because for many writers, the middle is the hardest part. It feels saggy. It’s a slog. The pace slows. You’ve set up all the fireworks but you’re not yet ready to light them as you march down toward the end. Because you’re not at the end yet! It’s not anywhere close! The end of your novel lies on a far distant shore and your boat is quickly running out of steam.

As you may have guessed, I’ve hit the muddled middle in my WIP this week. For a couple days I bravely pressed on, intent on getting my daily word count no matter what. (Because: I was on a roll! I had momentum going!) This, however, led to scenes that set my characters off in directions that did not serve the story and only made it more flacid. So finally this morning I took a break from madly pressing forward to do some diagnostics.

I looked back over the loose outline I’ve created for the novel (based even more loosely on the Save the Cat structure—but the screenwriting one, not the one for novels). Yes, I’m on track, where I’m supposed to be. But something still doesn’t feel right. And if there’s one thing that I know to be true for every single writer everywhere (and you know that telling you exactly what to do is anathema to me) it’s this: you’ve got to learn to trust your gut. It will never fail you, if only you will pay attention.

So I did what every befuddled writer does in a time of confusion. I turned to the Google for ideas.

The Google was full of them, of course. And it offered many suggestions, some of which were worthwhile. Ideas like, create subplots, add a new character, change location, figure out a new obstacle. All good, but none of them resonated. (But some of them might for you. And you might get help figuring that out with some side writing.) And then I landed on a Reddit thread that was the most helpful of all.

Because it made me ask myself the question: what if all of these ideas are just band-aids covering a festering wound? What if there were a flaw in my planning? What if my loose outline needed some tightening up?

And when I thought further I knew that what I suspected was true. My novel did have a festering wound I was trying to cover up. It was a small one, but if left untended it was not going to heal on its own. It would only grow. And the only way to deal with it was to go back to the beginning.

Before you think that I’m starting over again, I’m not. Maybe a better way to state it would be going back to the foundation. I am going to ask myself the questions that I know I did not fully answer when I started out:

—What does the main character want? What stands in her way of it?

—What does the antagonist want? Or for that matter, who is the antagonist? And what stands in the way of what he wants?

In my novel, my heroine’s goal is unclear (even to me). I know what she doesn’t want. And she knows that she’s vaguely unhappy and that life has gotten stagnant. But I’m afraid that doesn’t make for a compelling story goal. Also, pondering all this has made me realize I had designated the wrong antagonist! Wowza. That changes things.

But not that much. Not enough so that I am going to start over. I’ll keep writing as if all the things I figured out and made good notes on have already been written, while once in a while going back and adding things into previous scenes.

And with luck, with any luck at all, I’ll have pulled myself out of that muck by the next time you see me here.

Seriously—if you have any questions about the muddle in the middle or any other aspect of writing novels (or writing in general) lay them on me in the comments.