I know what I want for Scene Near The End, but how do I get from here to there?
Ah, the eternal murky muddle of a middle.
Here are some options:
1. Plotting In Reverse…. who was supposed to be next, and what were they supposed to accomplish?
For pantsers / discovery writers, the finished stories often have just as much structure as the plotters do, but it’s put in subconsciously. If you find yourself lost and aimless on the next chapter/scene, a great tool is sitting down and plotting out the story you’ve already written. I’ve rescued myself from the depths of story myopia before by simply looking at the story structure and pacing, and going “the next scene needs to have this amount of action / reaction, and it has to focus on this character, because we haven’t seen him in a while, and pick this subplot back up, because it got dropped…”
It’s easy to get focused on a character or plot/subplot, and drop a different thread instead of braiding them neatly together – but all of them must work together to drive the story. If one isn’t clearly driving the story anymore, that’s a good sign it really needs someone/something else to provide the push for the next piece.
2. Promises to the Reader… are you still writing the same story?
There’s a really fun book by Ric Locke called Temporary Duty, about… well, if you read the first half, it’s a screwball buddy comedy of two enlisted assigned to an alien spaceship, who are supposed to only be cleaning quarters for the actual delegation. If you read the second half, it’s a forerunner to Nathan Lowell, about one guy (half of the buddy comedy duo) exploring a new trade route and making good.
I do like the book, and recommend it… but always with the caveat that it’s two separate books in one. Like the anime Trigun, what you think you’re getting in the first half, and the story you get in the second half, are completely different.
Sadly, Ric is no longer with us, so I’ll never get to see which way he would have developed as a writer (at least, not this side of heaven.) Nonetheless, I take the lesson he taught me, and keep it in mind. When stuck in the murky middle, I go back to the beginning, and re-read, looking for the promises I made to the reader. What Checkov’s guns did I plant? What feels like foreshadowing? What questions did I put in the reader’s mind? What tone did I use?
(The answer is always more than I was aware of when writing the chapter the first time. Part of that is just the way the backbrain takes existing throwaway references and builds them into important things as the story goes on, but more than once, I’ve found the setup for the next part was already baked into the first three chapters.)
3. Choose your scope. Put some worldbuilding back. Nope, still too much. Focus down tight.
I don’t need to explain the entire political machinations between the two giant countries. I don’t need to explain the history. I don’t have to catch you up on the high level events. All I have to show you is how these two teams, who are on the opposite sides of a cold war, react to each other when they’re both trying to keep a low profile, and there’s a six-year-old girl avidly listening in and commenting on their conversation.
4. Left Turn At Albuquerque …maybe the big complicated thing you can’t wrap your head around how to do doesn’t happen. What happened instead?
I spent over two months trying to figure out how to have an airship in a naval battle and not end with it being shot out of the sky. Its survival wasn’t realistic or feasible, and I couldn’t envision a way forward…
…until I finally went “what if it didn’t make it to the battle? What happened instead?”
*facepalm* Oh, yeah. Duh. And obviously, then this would happen. and because of that, this other thing would go haywire thataway, and…
***
5. What tactics do you use?
Mad Genius Club 
11 responses to “Left Turn At Albuquerque”
I ruminate on the plot while dropping off to sleep. The busy elves in my (back-)brain present rough “of course! This happens” concepts in the morning.
On a practical level, I find that there is not uncommonly a wrong turn back not long before the stuck point, which I have named “The Tepid Swamp of Niceness”. It’s worth seeing if you can find that and trying to replace the way forward from just before there with real story instead of just tra-la-la-ing along from that point, having been caught in a groove.
I’ve found the man with the gun who bursts through the door very helpful for the Tepid Swamp of Characters Enjoying Life.
I needed to end a scene between two characters who’d just gone through a big misunderstanding. ‘This is the part where they have to think it all over separately, but they won’t do that on their own.’
So, a police car parked in front of the house and the officer rang the doorbell. 😊
Man with the gun to the rescue! 😀
Reverse plotting and looking for seeds already planted are probably my main tactics, although my current WIP and the book immediately before it lend themselves reasonably well to “man with a gun bursts into the room,” although sometimes it’s an overexcited, underexercised Great Dane looking for its owner in a fancy dinner party.
For high level review of what comes next, and quiet important foreshadows that I need to go back and plant, I’ve found writing my ideas out longhand (not drafting, brainstorming) seems to help, and when I’m getting brainlock in a middle of a scene where I know where I’m going but not sure how to articulate it, discussing it with the AI seems to help.
“On the whole, I’d rather prefer a dragon.”
The dragon comes later in this particular novel. 🙂 I had kind of a Hound of the Baskervilles subplot going, and overexcited Great Dane was part of that.
I jump to a different bit, and let the hindbrain simmer over things. It helps that I have a bit in brackets at the end of each section, and of the story with:
[jake meets old friend. Friend is acting strange. Jake wonders why, goes to talk to older friend. Fight ensues on the way. jake discovers {THING} and realizes he needs help, and friends with guns. They deal with {THING}]
That gives me ideas, and gets revised, tweaked, and changed over the course of writing.
I find it really hard to go back and work out the bridging material afterwards when I do that, but sometimes it’s necessary.
I thrash these out all in the outline stage, where I can easily work before and after in the timeline.