Hello from the boggy middle.
I was staring at the cursor and its mocking blinking while it waited for me to get it moving again in my Pages document when I remembered that somehow two weeks had passed since my last missive.
So I swiped away from the mocking cursor and opened Substack. I have actually scheduled my last post of the year and then I had a draft sitting there which I revisited and I wanna know what headspace I was in when I started writing because I was clearly feeling some kind of way.
A way that I no longer feel and so when I thought maybe I could make that work to create this week’s missive I quickly realised that I can’t. That draft may never stop being a draft.
So instead what happened when I opened Substack was that I was confronted with another white page and another mocking cursor and a huge case of ‘what the fuck am I supposed to say'? Except this one was worse because it was completely blank.
So let me talk about the boggy middle because I guess that is where I am.
In the depths of October I said that at some point I am going to have to make a judgement call on whether I keep plugging away at TFT first draft chronologically or if I was going to skip the good bit. The good bit being the parts that had come to me in some way. Most of the good bits were at the end.
I skipped to the good bit. Which means that I know have an ending.
In theory that means that working towards that ending should be easy right?
Right?
Wrong.
I am currently trying to resist the urge to just skip ahead and ahead and ahead and speed up the sequence of events to try and get to where I want to be. Which is this shiny ending.
Except it’s not shiny because as I write the middle bit I am realising that I am going to have to change it. Parts of it. Maybe only small parts of it. Maybe the whole damn thing.
I am now writing towards something that feels too clunky as an ending. It no longer feels like the way these characters would act. I want to switch whole characters. I need to add whole new scenes in somewhere.
I’m torn between doing that now while I am still technically still sitting in a first draft that can be as messy as I want it. Or if I am actually now that I’ve done it a grand total of once, the kind of person who needs a first draft to be kind of ‘clean’. And I don’t mean clean as in I think that it will be perfect. I mean clean in the sense that I edit as I go so that when I bang on about completing a first draft it is more coherent than what I currently have.
If I know I want to change something why don’t I just change it now and see where that goes instead of fucking around and then making the second draft a messy nightmare?
I feel like the fact that I am questioning this in such a way, much in the same way I did when I was talking about moving about to write the things that I had not move from point a to point b, means that I am going to do it.
Because writing the middle is revealing new things to me. It’s giving me new ideas. It’s putting a spotlight on things that I hadn’t really thought of when I ran ahead and wrote the end. I’m finding that conversations that I had written to happen later on actually might need to happen earlier.
Now if you remember (not that I expect you to, I talked about this in October and I sent a lot of missives in October, I don’t expect you to have read them all) I went into this with an outline. It was a rough af outline, but it was there.
It was supposed to be my touchstone so that I had the skeleton to flesh out and make something more solid.
Yeah, I have had to throw the majority of that outline out of the window.
Although that isn’t quite the most accurate way to describe what is happening. the outline I have was always supposed to just have the key highlights that I needed/wanted to hit and then I had a lot of space to fuck around and find out. The highlights are written in such a way that they happen chronologically as I had written them in my notebook for this project.
And what fucking around and finding out is teaching me is that these events that I plotted out had no business happening in the order that I originally planned. Which now means that I am floating in the ether with nothing to tether me to the spine of this story because I broke it (that’s accidentally quite dark).
So the boggy middle feels especially boggy right now because I have nothing to guide me.
I keep looking at my plan for this month (thanks Pacemaker) and it all feels very overwhelming because in October the word counts per day felt manageable. Now in December, they are huge. I mean they are still manageable, but they are larger than they have been and when you’re in the part where everything feels like moving through treacle it is not what you want to be faced with.
I think taking the break to write this has helped me find my way back to it. I have also had a couple of other ideas come to me that I’m going to write down. I think I am probably going to slowly rewrite my ending when I get to it as I move through writing this to the end. I will have a finished first draft by the end of the year.
And isn’t that just wild?
Jumpin’ Jumpin’
What I’m reading - If you were a Jacob girlie OR you love a little Grey’s Anatomy moment then may I introduce you to The Fake Make - Lana Ferguson which is a crossover of both these things and can help you with all your knotting needs (IYKYK). Also taking the new lead for my favourite Lauren Asher couple are Julian and Dahlia in Love Redesigned. And I have just started The Long Game - Elena Armas.
I also have a bunch of Christmas reads on my TBR which I am going to highlight now because the next time I am in your inbox will be the 21st and that is basically too late. So:
Wreck the Halls - Tessa Bailey
A Holly Jolly After - Julia Murphy and Sierra Simone
Second Chances in New Port Stephen - TJ Alexander
Make You Mine This Christmas - Lizzie Huxley-Jones
What I’m watching - I don’t think I’m watching anything new really. Just continuing to watch the things that I always watch (Strictly, I’m A Celeb, EastEnders). It is now Variety Actors on Actors season and that is one of my favourite seasons, so I will start watching them. I also feel like I might start the final season of Sex Education.
Title Inspiration - This song is apparently the song I have played most this year which sounds about right but then also it feels like it should be the song that closes this album because I thought I played that one more. Anyway, Love From the Other Side - Fall Out Boy