I hate the middle sections of novels. I think I've written about this before, but the middle section, 'Act 2', has always been the most difficult for me. The first act, I have the fresh excitement of a new story and new characters on a new world (even if it's a here-and-now setting, it's still 'new') making up the rules as I go. I charge forward to the crescendo and tumble myself down the other side... into a dank, tensionless swap I have to slog through to reach the home-run-stretch of Act 3. The excitement of act 1 has climaxed, and we're dumped back into a slow rebuild of tension for the next one, but there's no clear path. If I'm going to can a novel mid-way through, the middle is where it'll happen.

Which is why I was concerned for Shadowren, my current fantasy novel. At the moment, and for the next two months at least, my time is overcommitted and almost all of my writing is taking place not at home, but at one of my workplaces in the early morning before my shift starts. For technical reasons, it's extremely difficult to access my novel there, so I've been writing shorts instead. I haven't touched the text of Shadowren in weeks. And the point where I left of was up to its armpits in Middle Swamp Of Doom. Not only was I finding it like dental surgery to write, I had no real idea which direction the swamp exit was - I had only the vaguest and not-very-enticing idea of what the ending would be, and absolutely no idea as to 'why'. It was like a Hollywood director saying there has to be an explosion, while the scriptwriter has no idea what there'll be to blow up.

It's been just on four weeks since I last wrote any of it. It's dropped back in my mind as short stories, work and more pedestrian concerns have taken over, and a surprising thing happened. This week, things started to 'click' - a new direction of the story started to form. It started with realising that an event I'd been 'saving' for the last section really belonged in the middle, (at last giving me something to write about!) and then branched out to touch pretty much every aspect of the novel so far.

The more I listened to the ideas and explored them, the more I saw the weaknesses and holes in the current version, and how the new one - a rather different-but-still-the-same story - could fix them. It would involve a lot of rewriting of existing material - so much so that it feels rather like I'm looking at a complete redraft of the novel before having finished the first draft.

This only happened because I left the work alone - I stopped trying to push through what wasn't working, and gave my brain the space to think. Instead of scrabbling for ways to make the current mess work, it was able to look at alternatives. Different meanings and motives, different character developments and arcs. If I'd kept on going, it probably would have taken me until the end of this draft to realise just how much was 'wrong' with it - and then I'd face that horrible feeling of looking at a story and knowing that 80% is 'wrong'.

So sometimes - but not all the time - not writing that story is exactly what it needs. The trick is, obviously, to tell those times apart from the times when what you really need to do is just bulldoze along and tell your inner editor / procrastinator / child to go sit in the corner with a playstation while you get this done. If I ever find a foolproof method for that, believe me I'll share it, but I think that's a post for another time.

• Add New
• Search
• RSS

Comments (0)

Write comment

Your Contact Details:

Name:

Email: do not notifynotify

Website:

Comment:

Title:

Message:

Security

Please input the anti-spam code that you can read in the image.

Powered by !JoomlaComment 4.0 beta2