The purpose of this post is two-fold. Firstly, I celebrated my December graduation from college yesterday with many friends and family and got a number of lovely gifts. Even though I've already got one degree I'm not satisfied with that so I'm also getting a second (I'm in nursing school)...and probably a third (once I'm out of nursing school). So you can definitely say that I am academically inclined. But first and foremost I am a writer and have always been a writer so my love for the written word outpaces my love for sutures and bandages (even though I love all that stuff too). But I digress, when I got to my boyfriend's present and opened it, it was a journal with an owl (my favorite bird), a green quill pen, and a bottle of ink. I LOVED them. But he pulled me aside a little later on and whispered "I know you're working really hard on your nursing degree and I'm so proud of all your accomplishments but don't ever stop writing, that's really what my gift was all about.You're so amazing with words."...and that's why I will marry that man. In short, I've gotten a greater boost of confidence to continue to hone my literary craft and a new quill to practice my calligraphy haha...which is proving to not be one of my strong points (my messy handwriting is the stuff of legend).
Secondly, I was on my way somewhere (the destination is irrelevant) a few days ago when a thought occurred to me. I'm at a stage in my manuscript where I'm thinking about the end. I've kind of gotten hung up on the middle bits and I'm trying desperately to do a Charlie Chaplin (or a Tarantino) and figure out the end and then work backwards to the bit where I'm stuck. This is a new thing for me since I find it kind of difficult to think that way but I have such a problem with middles. Generally I know how I want the story to begin; I have great endings but the middles are just....black holes that seem impossible to fill appropriately. It's probably a mental imagery issue. I'm trying to correct it but it just seems so expansive. Middles are hard. There's just so much you can put in there, you could have spaceships land in the middle of your medieval fantasy and kidnap the main character for probing if you wanted, it may turn the story to absolute crap but it's possible! And what's maddening is that I have a few clips in my mind for middles that work really well as episodes, but they are far apart in the story's chronology so linking them together is still more of that damnable middle witchcraft that seems to swell my story. No one wants a middle that's filled with flash-points every few chapters followed by some sluggish filler. NO! You (and your readers) want a middle that'll grab them by their hair and keep their noses pushed as far into the book binding as they can possibly be. That's what's throwing me off, I guess. The broadness of the middle is a huge chasm with the beginning on one side and the end on the other.
Think about it. Beginnings need to be told properly, you need to hook your reader, introduce themes, characters, the world dynamic and a bunch of other things, but since you're the writer you already (if' you've done the proper legwork before hand) have some idea of these things already. Endings...well you END the story. It has to be a good ending and tie up all the loose ends (or introduce a plot further if you're going to leave your readers frothing for your sequel). But there's a point at which the end is...well the END it stops. Even the beginning has a point where it ENDS and that dreaded infinite middle area just lurks there.
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