How to Write Your Way Out of Your Novel’s Middle
It’s possible to escape the cruel torture that is the middle of your book.
Writing a novel is a long, twisted journey to and through the middle. I know this because I’ve published two books, and while the beginnings and endings of each were clear to me, writing the middle felt like I’d booked passage to a country where the language and customs were foreign to me — a journey from which I wasn’t sure I’d return. Writing the middle was so paralyzing that I wrote both of my books — a memoir published in 2008 and a novel nearly a decade after — out of order.
Novel writing became an assemblage of puzzle pieces; I’d spent years arranging and rearranging chapters to see where things fit.
When it comes to writing, I’m fiercely pragmatic. I don’t have copious amounts of time to work on a book because I’m busy working on my income. Who has time to sit around and “awaken the muse” (I don’t think I’ve ever used that expression in 35 years of writing, but I suppose there’s a first time for everything) when you have to pay rent, student loan debt, and manage a laundry list of other financial obligations that creep into your mailbox uninvited? While I live for the art and architecture of crafting characters, plotlines, and sentences, I treat the act of writing a novel like a…
