Stuck in the middle of my novel: how do I push through?

By Brenn and Lindsay, the two writers who built Inkling

Every novel we have written has a stretch where the whole thing goes quiet. Here is what actually got us out, from two writers who have stood in that swamp more than once.

Every novel we have written has a stretch, somewhere around the forty percent mark, where the whole thing goes quiet. The opening was fun. The ending is a bright shape a long way off. In between is a swamp, and we are standing in it, and the word count has not moved in a week.

If you are here because you typed “stuck in the middle of my novel” into a search box at eleven at night, you are in good company. Here is what works.

Why do middles sag?

Because the setup is done and the ending is too far away to pull. In the first act, every scene has a job you can name: introduce her, show the town, drop the problem in her lap. Those jobs run out. Somewhere in act two the introductions are over, the problem is understood, and the ending, the thing that gives every scene its purpose, is still thirty thousand words off. It cannot exert any gravity from that distance.

So scenes start to drift. Characters travel places. They have conversations that restate what we already know. You can feel the book coasting and you do not know which pedal to press.

It helps to know this is structural, not personal. There is a good Substack piece from Next Chapters on writing when you are stuck in the middle, and the #AmWriting podcast devoted a whole episode to the question “why can’t I finish my novel?” The middle sags for most of us, at roughly the same spot. The question is not whether you are a real writer. It is what to do on Tuesday.

Should I outline the rest now?

A page, not a plan for every scene. When we get stuck, the temptation is to stop and build an enormous outline, colour-coded, with a card for every beat from here to the end. That is a way of not writing that looks like writing.

Do something smaller. Open a blank page and write the rest of the book as you would tell it to a friend across a table: and then she finds out, and then they go north, and then the brother turns up, and then it ends like this. One paragraph per remaining act, a page at most. Leave gaps. Write “something goes wrong here, not sure what” if that is honestly where you are.

The point is not to solve the book. It is to give the ending enough shape that it can start pulling again. If the word outline gives you hives, our guide on pantsers and plotters is for you, and the one-page version we are describing here is about as far as most pantsers ever need to go.

Can I skip ahead and write the ending?

Yes. And then write toward it. Nobody is checking that you wrote the chapters in order. If the climax is the scene you can see most clearly, write it now, today, badly. Get the confrontation down, get the last image down, get the line you have been saving since chapter one.

Two things happen. First, you remember why you wanted to write this book. Second, you now have a fixed point on the far side of the swamp, and every middle scene has a new job: get us from here to there. Scenes that were drifting suddenly have a direction to drift in.

You will rewrite the ending later, once the middle has changed what it means. That is fine. A draft ending you will replace is worth more than a perfect ending you never reach.

How do I raise the stakes without inventing a new plot?

You do not need a new plot. You need to squeeze the one you have. Three moves that have not failed us yet:

Take away what they want. Whatever your protagonist has been reaching for since the first page, put it further off. The letter is lost. The ally says no. The door they were walking toward closes. Wanting is the engine of the book, and wanting gets stronger when it is denied.

Bring in the person who makes it worse. Not a new villain. Someone who was already in the story and now has a reason to get in the way: the sister with her own agenda, the mentor with a secret, the friend who needs something at exactly the wrong moment. Middles come alive when the cast starts pulling in different directions.

Give the middle a turn. Somewhere near the centre of the book, let something happen that changes what the protagonist knows or wants, so the second half is not a repeat of the first. A false victory that curdles. A revelation that recasts the opening. It is usually the moment the reader stops reading to see what happens and starts reading to see how she gets out of this.

None of these require a new subplot. If you already have three subplots and cannot remember what state each one is in, that is a different problem, and we wrote a guide on tracking subplots for exactly that.

What if I just write a summary in brackets?

It counts. Keep going.

[She confronts her mother here. It goes badly. Mother reveals the thing about the house. End on the door.] That is a scene. Not a finished one, but the shape of one, and the shape is what you were missing. Bracketed summaries let you move at the speed of the story instead of the speed of your prose, which in the middle of a draft is the whole game. You can write six bracketed scenes in an afternoon and find the seventh comes out as actual sentences, because you finally know where you are.

We reach the end this way more often than we would like to admit. Every bracket is a note to the person you will be in a month, and that person will be delighted to have a map.

When should I stop and revise?

Not now. We know. The opening chapters are sitting there, and they are so much better than the scene you are trying to write today, and surely if you just went back and polished chapter three the rest would come. It would not. Revising the beginning while the middle is unwritten is the most common way novels quietly stop. You polish a lovely first act for a book that does not exist.

Make a list instead. Keep one note called Fix Later, and every time you notice something wrong upstream, write one line and go back to the scene you are on. The brother needs to be introduced earlier. The town needs a name. The list will be long and it will wait. Revision is a different job, done with a different part of your brain, and it goes much faster once you have a whole draft to revise.

If you want a deadline to push against, a thirty-day sprint is built for exactly this stretch. Our guide to writing a novel in 30 days lays out the pace, and the November planner turns it into a daily target.

How we use Inkling for this

We built Inkling for the two of us, and the middle is where we lean on it most.

The storyboard lays the book out as cards, one per chapter or scene, that you can drag to reorder. Seeing the shape helps more than we expected. A sagging middle is visible on a board: a run of cards that all say roughly the same thing, or a climax card sitting a long way from anything that points at it. Move one card and the whole stretch can reorganise around it. Our guide to storyboarding a novel walks through how we do it.

The character builder keeps the cast beside the draft, so when you go looking for the person who makes it worse, she is right there with her wants and grudges listed, instead of buried somewhere in chapter four.

Stories have a status, and one of them is literally “stuck.” We added it because we needed it. Marking a story stuck is not failing. It is telling the desk the truth, and a stuck story sits in the library where you can see it, instead of pretending to be in progress.

And when you come back after a bad week, the Previously recap, written from your own words, tells you where you left off so you do not have to reread thirty pages to find the swamp again.

Inkling is a subscription, $9 a month or $72 a year at the founding price, with a 14-day trial and no card. If you would rather push through in whatever tool you already have, everything above works without us.

The middle is where books are actually written. Go write a bad scene in brackets. We will be doing the same.