The saying goes that "a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." The lesson (I think) is that no matter how big of a job is front of you, you need to get it started if it's ever going to get done. I agree with that. In my previous post, I said the most important thing about starting a book (or chapter, or page) is to get started right away.
The less obvious lesson is this: a thousand miles is a very, very long journey. It can be exhausting. Once the beginning is written, there can be a whole lot of middle before getting to the end. Looked at one way, the largest part of the work is all middle. But there are other ways to look at it. Here I like to draw on my programming background. What I learned over 20+ years in the software industry is that creating a large and complex application can be a lot easier if you approach it as if it were a group of smaller and simpler apps working together. I can create a program that does nothing else except open a connection to a database, and then close it again. I can create another program that reads a list of names and addresses from a database table. I can create a program that adds a new record to the database, and I can create one that sorts a list of names, and one that can print a list from the screen onto paper. Put those all together and I've got an address book application that allows me to open a database, retrieve my list of contacts, update it and print it out.
The same can be applied to writing a novel. Writing hundreds of pages is a lot of work. Just thinking about it is a lot of work. So I concentrate on smaller chunks. I write a chapter, or a scene, or a paragraph. Maybe just a sentence. Instead of a huge unwritten middle standing between your beginning and some faraway ending, instead there are a lot of smaller chunks. Don't worry about how many, just concentrate on one of them. It doesn't even have to be the one that comes next in the story. Let's say you have written an opening about a young man named Norton, who finds himself having to spend the summer with his grandparents on a farm instead of at camp with his friends. In the back of your mind, you have this image of Norton running through the woods, being chased by a bear. You have no idea how far into the story this will happen, or what events transpire to get Norton from his arrival at the farm to the big chase scene. You sit for an hour, unsure what to write, how to bridge the gap. My advice? If it were me, I would just go ahead and write the chase scene. I say this for many reasons. One, you will have written something, and I always feel better after a session where I get some words on paper than a session where I just spend the time thinking things over (although I also believe that thinking through the story, especially in the editing phase, can be every bit as productive as writing.) Two, you will discover things about your character and story that can help fill in the gaps later on. Maybe Norton escapes the bear by climbing up into a tree house and pulling the ladder up behind him. Now you can go back to that first day at the farm, where Norton is bored and unhappy, an have his grandfather try to cheer him up by telling him about this great treehouse out in the woods nearby. The order in which you put the pieces together does not detract from the beauty of the finished puzzle. And three, never forget one of your goals (and mine) should be to continue to improve as a writer: clichéd or not, practice makes perfect. If you can't think of a scene to write, then write a scene you are thinking of, and even if you end up cutting it later you've gained some experience from it.
There are other methods to keep things on track while working through the middle. Some writers create an outline first, so they know what to work on next because the outline tells them. Outlines don't work well for me, and in any event I find myself with the same issues writing an outline as I do writing a novel. I'm not sure what comes next, but I think I know what will come some further point down the road. So if I'm putting together an outline I'm writing a brief description of the scenes I can think of, then trying to think of more scenes to fill the gap so I can plug the holes in the outline. So it's the same process but on a smaller scale. So if my advice for beginnings is just to get started already, my advice on middles is to keep going. Concentrate on small pieces and knock those out, and let the momentum build until there are enough pieces to connect together and form the bridge between Once upon a time and they all lived happily ever after. Or between It was a dark and stormy night and everyone dies. Every story is different; start now and write yours. And post a comment here every once in a while to me know how it's going.
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