Hello, my pretties!
There’s a moment in every draft when the initial excitement wears off and you’re left staring at your manuscript wondering what on earth you were thinking.
Welcome to the messy middle.
The beginning was fun—you were still getting to know your characters, and the possibilities for the story felt endless. You knew exactly where you were going, or at least you thought you did.
Now you’re thirty thousand words in, and everything feels wrong. The plot has holes. The characters are acting strangely. You’re not sure if this is a book or an elaborate waste of time.
I’m here to tell you: This is completely normal. Every writer I know hits this wall. The ones who finish books are simply the ones who keep writing anyway.
Why the Middle Is Hard
The middle of a book is where the real work happens. Beginnings are about promise. Endings are about payoff. But middles? Middles are about complication, development, and earning everything that comes later.
That’s a lot of pressure.
In Romance, the middle is where your characters have to grow closer while obstacles keep them apart. The tension has to escalate without feeling manufactured. Readers need to believe in the relationship while also believing it might not work out.
No wonder it feels impossible some days.
For writers, the middle is also the point in the process where self-doubt hits hardest. You’ve written enough to see the flaws but not enough to see the whole picture. You’re too close to the story to evaluate it clearly and too far from the end to feel momentum.
This is the valley. Every book has one.
Strategies for Survival
When the middle of a draft gets tough, I rely on a few strategies to help me keep moving.
First, I return to my outline to remind myself where I’m headed. Sometimes the middle feels aimless because I’ve drifted from my emotional beats. Reconnecting with the structure helps me find direction again.
Second, I write the scenes I’m excited about, even if they’re out of order. If chapter 15 is calling to me but I’m stuck on chapter 10, I skip ahead. I can fill in the gaps later. Momentum matters more than sequence.
Third, I lower my expectations. Middle chapters don’t need to sparkle; they simply need to exist. I can revise them into something better later, but first they have to be on the page.
Finally, I talk to other writers, not for solutions necessarily, but instead for solidarity. Knowing that everyone struggles with middles makes my struggle feel less like a personal failure.
The Scene that Unlocks Everything
Often, somewhere in the messy middle, there’s a scene that changes everything. You may write it almost by accident, but once you do, it can make the whole book suddenly make sense.
For some projects, it’s a conversation that reveals character motivation; for others, it’s a plot twist even the author didn’t see coming. For my current draft—and maybe I should have expected this, as I am writing a Romance—it was an emotional moment between the two main characters that showed me what the story is really about.
You can’t plan for this scene. You can only create the conditions for it to emerge by continuing to write even when it feels pointless.
The breakthrough comes from the work, not before it.
Permission to Be Imperfect
Your messy middle will be, as the name suggests, messy. Some writers even call it “stodgy,” like you are wading through a pot of overnight chia pudding. Progress will be slow, subplots will tangle like overgrown brambles, and you’ll likely reach a point where you’d give anything for a knight in shining armor to cut through the lot with his sword—then set fire to it.
Give yourself permission to write scenes that don’t quite work. Write dialogue that feels stilted. Write transitions that are basically “and then stuff happened.” You can fix all of it in revision.
What you cannot do is revise words that don’t exist.
Here’s something I remind myself when the middle feels endless: Once you’re halfway through a draft, you’re closer to the end than the beginning.
That’s progress, even if it doesn’t feel like it.
Keep going. The other side exists, and you will reach it.
Reflection Exercise
When you find yourself caught in the messy middle, ask yourself the following questions:
- Where in my drafts do I typically get stuck?
- What helps me reconnect with a story when I’ve lost momentum?
- Am I holding my middle chapters to an unfairly high standard?
- What would “good enough for now” look like in my current draft?
I use several tricks I learned from my days as a drama student. As budding actors, we would often get stuck in rehearsals. Energy would be low. Everyone was tired. Motivation was a missing character. To combat this, the director would make us stop working from the script and “play” with our characters. That could involve improvising a scene, putting one of us in a hot seat and asking questions like, “What did your character have for breakfast?”; running the scene in a different setting, so the cozy lounge became Central Station; or asking all of us to say our lines as if we were underwater. I am not suggesting you take your laptop for a swim, but how about taking your main character out for an imaginary night out? Wine them and dine them; ask them about what they want to happen next. Or read the scene you just wrote aloud in a funny accent.
Or walk away and grab a coffee. Anything that helps you take a step back and gives you a different perspective can make the messy middle seem a little less messy.
Reality Check-In
I hit the messy middle this month. Hard.
Around the thirty-thousand-word mark, I convinced myself the entire book was broken. The pacing felt off, my hero seemed boring, and the romantic tension I’d carefully built suddenly felt forced.
I considered starting over. I considered abandoning the project entirely. I considered whether I was even qualified to write Romance at all.
Instead, I took a breath and kept writing. I wrote three scenes I wasn’t sure belonged anywhere. I wrote a conversation between my leads that turned out to be the emotional core of the book.
Now I’m at thirty-eight thousand words, and I can see the path to the end. The middle is still messy, but I’m through the worst of it.
If you’re in the valley right now, keep going. The view from the other side is worth it.
Happy writing,
Susan
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