Mushy Middle

Hello from NYC, writers, where July is mushy.

A New York July is humid, subject to heat waves like the one we endured over the July 4^th holiday, and slower (for us), not only because of the climate, but because like 75 percent of New Yorkers are away.

But what better time than the mushy middle of the year to talk about the mushy middle of our stories?

This phenomenon strikes when you’re about halfway through a piece, and suddenly both story and writer hit a slog. Your creative engine is sputtering, and no matter how many words you write, the story bogs down.

Sometimes, according to Dinty Moore, author and founder of Brevity magazine, hitting a mushy middle is just your brain, doing brain things.

“Our brains want to sink into predictability,” Dinty wrote recently at Brevity Blog. “They tend to regurgitate, turning the same stones over and over, looking for a new answer to some old riddle. It is our job to wake them up, work them loose, throw them a curve.”

Sometimes, too, a mushy middle happens because the writer is forcing themselves to write their story in chronological order. I don’t mean structuring it chronologically. I mean writing the beginning first, then the middle, and saving the end for last.

Who said you have to write things in order? You do not have to write things in order. In fact, forcing yourself to do so can stifle your creativity.

Regardless of how you land in one, the best way out is to shake things up.

OK, but how?

Here are four potential methods:

Chaos:

Gotham memoir teacher Emily Rapp Black rarely writes a story in order. And even still, she, too, sometimes has to shake things up.

In her new craft book, I Would Die If I Were You: Notes on Art and Truth-Telling, here’s one way Emily recommends shaking things up:

“Print the essay or story or chapter. Cut it up into its individual paragraphs and then put these pieces of paper in a pile. Put your hands in the pile and start shuffling as if you were a hotshot dealer in Vegas, and now toss the pieces up like you were making pizza dough and see how they land. Have fun with the paper and with the mixed metaphors. Start moving these pieces around to see if it’s possible to arrange the story in a different way as they’ve fallen on the surface, by chance or fate or whatever. They fell that way; see if there’s a new beginning in there you might try as your opening gesture.”

Do this twice more. [Emphasis Kelly’s]. In between rounds, you can take a screenshot of your new arrangement or tape it together and put it in an envelope and print the material again for the next two rounds. You will feel silly. You might feel annoyed, you might laugh, you might weep. That is the point. And you will discover something new about your story, I assure you. You might also have some fun.

Chaos, with a side of structure:

Gotham Children’s Book Writing teacher Christine Hartman Derr understands that too much chaos can bog you down just as much as too much structure. So she employs a bit of both.  

Christine, whose debut middle grade novel Raven, Rising came out July 7th, writes the first draft of her stories in whatever order the scenes and ideas come to her. She embraces the idea of a messy first draft.

And once she has that messy first draft, then, she outlines the story—in reverse.

In the reverse outline, she says, she unearths surprises and fresh ideas. She also discovers what is working—in Raven, Rising, the book’s first sentence stayed basically unchanged through every revision.

Fun, on purpose:

Awhile back, I wrote about how your creative mind actually needs you to have fun. Human brains are wired to remember and learn from bad experiences, while fun ones kind of pass on through. So sometimes you need to help your brain hang onto the memories and sensations of happiness.

We came up with a raft of writing exercises designed for laughter, play, and joy. Give them a try, and as you’re writing, don’t cling to the idea of writing from beginning to end.

Prompts are Good For You:

In that essay at Brevity Blog, Dinty Moore says that in a mushy middle, a simple prompt can be a jumper cable for both story and writer’s brain. (And of course he’s got a few suggestions!)

“Prompts are all about what pops unexpectedly into our heads, what our subconscious (or subliminal, instinctive) brains suggest out of the depths of our experience. This is what happens when we are dreaming, where all the weirdness stems from, but also the evocative and resonant.

“Prompts can undeniably increase the energy in a lagging creative heart.”

As you read through the methods these different writers use to escape the mushy middle, you’ll notice they all agree on one thing: A sure sign you’re in one is that you’re not having any fun anymore. I hope you’ll try one or several of their remedies, but the most important criteria is that, to you, they sound like fun.

Kelly Caldwell

Dean of Faculty, Gotham Writers