Being sick meant not a whole lot of anything got done, unless you count sleeping since that’s mostly what I did. I haven’t been writing a lot, but on the few good days I’ve had I have tired to find a few hours to get some words down. All of the reading I’ve been doing has really gotten my creative juices flowing and I’m currently working on four different books at once. I’ve tried to stick with one book and write it from start to finish before moving on but it doesn’t really work for me. I like to be able to bounce around between books, otherwise I find that I get bored. I’ve also realized I tend to write the start and ends of a book and then end up filling in the middle when I go back to edit. I’ve always ended up adding ten to twenty thousand words to a novel during edits but it wasn’t until just recently that I realized why that was. I remember reading that after edits your book should be 10% shorter than it was before, but that has NEVER been the case for me. No matter how hard I tried I always ended up making it longer. And now I know why.

Most writers will tell you that the middle is the hardest part to write. It’s necessary to the story but it’s the part that most writers would rather skip over. The beginning of a story is where we’re getting to know our characters and their goals. It’s where we figure out what makes them tick and what it is they really want, not just what they think they want. The end is the big finale, that thing we’ve been building toward, where all of our hard work and the character’s struggles pay off. The middle, eh, that’s where stuff happens, necessary stuff, but it’s usually not nearly as fun to write as the other.

I write the middle, it’s not like I completely skip over it or just put in a placeholder to fill in later—although it’s kind of like that. I write it but I don’t tend to put a lot of detail into things in the middle. It’s kind of like writing: She walked into a large room. But then going back and fleshing it out so that it ends up being: Gayle walked through the doorway, the sound of her boots on the polished marble floors echoed back at her, drawing her eyes up to the domed ceiling overhead.  

See, both say the same thing but the second one fleshes things out and gives the reader a better idea of what the space looks like rather than just telling them it’s a large room. It’s the whole show vs tell thing. And while there are always scenes peppered throughout that need to be fleshed out more, I would say that seventy percent or more are in the middle of the story. At least for me.

I think understanding your process and accepting it is one of the things writers struggle with. For years I tried to change how I did things because I listened to those successful authors who said it had to be done this way and all that did was make it harder and harder for me to write. Because their way of doing things did not work for me. I tried to make them work. I forced myself to sit down and write every day. To try and only write one book at a time. And then I ended up getting frustrated and when I couldn’t figure out where to go next, instead of switching to another story and working on it for a bit, I would find myself either staring at the screen wondering why I couldn’t find the words, or writing something I knew I would just end up deleting later because it felt forced. So I went from writing a new book every three or four months to a year going by without having finished anything.

Now, I write the way that works for me. That’s binge writing or spending hours at a time writing as much as possible while the characters are fresh in my head and talking loudly. Then, when they go silent I will switch to another book and see if those characters are ready to talk again. It means, writing like crazy for days on end and then not writing for days or even weeks. It means not forcing myself to write a certain amount of words every day. It means writing until the story is told and then setting it aside for a few weeks or a month before going back to edit.

This isn’t something that will work for everyone. But it works for me and so I’m finally embracing my process.