Writing Thoughts #15

Writing thought of the day #15:

Ahh, yes. It's THAT time again. The time when I stock up on tea and lock myself in my room. The time when everything changes. The time when you either make or break your story. The time when the faint of heart run, screaming, for the hills. The time all writers fear. Yes, that's right. 

THE MIDDLE.

So you have your beginning, and it's great. Fantastic, even. Brilliant, if you're one of those sickeningly optimistic people. You have an idea of where you want your story to go, and you may even have written a little of the end, just out of curiosity's sake. Your characters are working with you, and your bad guy is as evil as evil can be. But then... Then you hit a snag.

It's just little, at first. Like a snowflake. Tiny. Soft. Insignificant. For example, "What should so-and-so be doing during this scene?" Then it grows. Just a little bigger. "Well, I don't know what she should be doing. I'll just skip this and move on a few scenes; I'll figure it out later." Then it gets bigger. "Hmm... My story's disjointed with all these out-of-place, mini scenes. How do I string them together to get to the ending?" Until, eventually, you have the proverbial snowball rolling down the cliff of Writer's Doom, "Gosh, I haven't touched this story in months, and I STILL can't figure out what so-and-so should be doing!"

And then your story gathers dust, while, in the process of "taking a break" you've gone and moved on to another, shinier, more promising story. Until the same thing happens again. And again. And again.

You all know it happens. It may have even happened to YOU. In fact, I can almost count on it. So what does one do in such cases as these?

Please let me know when you find out.

The road to authorship is paved with the dusty, rotten corpses of half-finished manuscripts.