You’ve Got Everything, just not the beginning
The story is set, the magnificent ending already imagined and stored away, ready to be set down in a gripping fashion. But getting from the beginning to the end may require starting over
There’s a lot to think about and write down in the middle of the story.
I did not foresee the hardship involved in writing what is between the beginning and the end of a story.
It’s embarrassing because my intriguing beginning and the gripping end are less than ten thousand words.
I read that any creative work must, at its heart, come from experience and that a writer should use the material of their life to create anything of substantial value. The danger of following such advice, in my experience, is that life can be somewhat naked and too direct for any artistic purpose.
Describing anything the way it actually occurred is creatively destructive. Then I hear my writing voice moaning, but that is how it happened, and my creative voice says, who gives a shit.
Somewhere between those voices is authentic creativity.
I had decided who my central character was. I won’t pontificate on the sketching of the main character only to say what an important task that was.
One of the reasons I found it challenging to write the story was because I didn’t understand who the main character was. I’m in the middle of my story, and the main character is someone who could as quickly become a supporting character.
I rushed to judgment about the main character in the story. Now, deep into the account, I see how this rush was just a need to start somewhere.
Writing the middle of the book told me to rewrite the beginning and scrap the end.
I felt bedridden, sick, and frustrated by accepting that the beginning was wrong, but I’m not; I’m pleased and eager to rewrite. Imagine a sculpture with a piece of work half done, learning about a new clay better suited to his needs.
Anyone who reads me often enough will understand I have reams of flawed writing everywhere, online, in desk drawers, and inside letters. Still, all of it is practice.
The importance of a sub-plot has exposed me as a writer. I wrote at times without belief I would ever finish, nothing creative inside me except the dark despair. Yet here is a truth: never have I lived so fully, with sensory powers heightened, feeling and reflecting — hearing and memory have reached a significant degree of sharpness when writing.
As an inexperienced novelist, engaged in a creative battle, covered in other writers’ dust, and exhausted with the struggle, I’m writing the middle of the story, working not toward the end but back to the beginning.
