Stuck in the Middle

It’s been awhile since I’ve made a post about my creative writing pursuits and there’s a reason for that: I’m stuck. It’s a very real problem that a lot of writers face when writing a novel. You start with a great idea for a story and maybe even have a killer ending in mind but perhaps the middle is just a vague mush but that little detail is ignored by the excited writer brain that wants to jump into a new story idea.

That’s what happened to me. I’m now somewhere around the middle of writing my first novel and I’ve only got vague ideas of a few different scenes in it. This problem happens to a lot of writers but I think it’s probably worse for first time writers who unlike top tier published writers don’t have the time to work at their writing endeavors on a daily basis. So bigger gaps between writing progress can quickly drop you out of the writing mindset.

The other issue for aspiring writers that goes along with a larger time frame for trying to write a novel is that the brain is given too much time to reconsider what has already been written. Through the chapters I’ve already written I have a lot of re-write ideas in mind to improve upon them. Which is great except for the fact that if I continually go back and re-write what I’ve already done then I will never get the entirety of the novel finished. I haven’t allowed myself to start doing that but the flip side of that is that everything I write going forward has to be filtered through what has already been written and what I likely change about what has already been written.

And so that is where I find myself. Two of my main characters are traveling on a road together towards some vague destination where something that I haven’t figured out yet will probably take place.

I think that also gets into another aspect of writing skills: World building. Creating the world in which the characters live. I find that I can easily write an action filled scene in a book but when the action is at a low point, I really struggle to describe the world around my characters in any kind of interesting way.

So there you have it, my little writing update. I wrote this post in hopes that getting all of this stuff out of my head and onto the screen would help open up some road blocks in my head. I guess I’ll find out how well it worked.


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One response to “Stuck in the Middle”

  1. kurt Avatar

    Inspired by your story today, guess what I searched to get here. lol