— Mark Paxson
A few weeks ago, I saw a few writers on the Tweeter express that the beginning of a story is always the hardest part for them. I thought that was interesting because the beginning is the easiest part for me. By far.
I’m a pantser, so I don’t have an outline. I just have an idea that I think may make for a good story. I typically don’t have any idea about anything beyond the idea.
For instance, a guy has a consensual one-night stand and is accused of sexual assault. That’s the idea, but as I started to write it, I had no idea how it would end, or how I would get to the end. Or, a clerk at a store catches somebody shop lifting and offers him a deal to avoid the consequences. Same thing, an idea, but I had no idea where it would take me. As I started writing that story, I didn’t even know what the deal was.
Part of this is because my stories frequently begin with prompts that I find on the various writing websites. Prompts that spark something in me and I just start writing. If the idea seems like a long story, I can typically churn out 10,000 – 25,000 words relatively easy.
The way I describe this is at the beginning, the world is wide open for me. I can go anywhere, do anything. I am exploring the idea as I write and that is a freeing experience for me.
But once I get to a certain point, I start to see the rest of the story. I start to ponder an ending, and everything just suddenly stops. Those first 25,000 words may take a month or two. The next 25,000 words may take years as I struggle with a couple of things.
First, if I’ve figured out the rest of the story, won’t the reader also. And if that’s the case, what’s the point. I become bored with the idea because I now know how it is going to end and I’ve figured out most of the in between points that will get me there. The exploration ends and the slog begins.
Second, and contradictory, is this … what if I get it wrong? The piece I’m working on now could have many endings. I’ve considered a lot of different things and landed on one that may be too much for some readers. But, to me, it fits the whole feel of the story … which is weird and quirky and full of things that don’t really make sense. So, an ending that matches that is an ending worth pursuing.
But again … what if I get it wrong?
Everything slows down at this point. Putting words down slows to a crawl. I can sit in front of my laptop for an afternoon and be fortunate to pull 200-300 words out of my head. And I really start to let the distractions distract me because anything is better than sitting there and noodling over every single paragraph, every single bit of dialogue, every everything.
This doesn’t always happen. A couple of years ago, I published a novella. A domestic thriller of about 30,000 words. For some reason, I was able to write the thing completely within a couple of months. There was no stalling, no delay, it just all came out in an orderly fashion.
Oh sure, there was one point at which I decided I wanted to change the voice and started to go through that process and then changed my mind after going through the first 1/3 of the book. But beyond that, that novella just flowed out of me.
As near as I can tell the reason for this is that the story was a surprise story. One that I never knew was in me until it just showed up one day. I never really took that story too seriously. Not in the sense that I didn’t want to do a good job on it, but it was a bit of a lark to write it.
Here’s another thing, the more I write, the more complicated my story ideas become. That domestic thriller novella — a really simple, basic story. My first novel, the same. But the piece I’m working on now (may be a novella, may just barely reach the 50,000 word mark to be a novel) is more complicated. It is somewhat dystopian, a bit bizarre, in some respects it kind of creates a whole different world, and there are elements to it that I just need to make sure are consistent and complete and carry through the entire thing.
So, here are my questions for you…
What’s the hardest part of a story for you? What’s the easiest? When it comes to those hard parts, are there any strategies you follow to get over the hump, to get past the difficulty and ease into the better parts of the story?
Writers Supporting Writers 
I am also a ‘pantser’. All my stories start with a single, clear image of something unknown. Not a clue what it’s about. Toss it into the dark recesses of my mind to fester away, then it knocks on my skull weeks or months later demanding attention, along with the likely start. A cracking of the knuckles, a deep breath and away we go. Once in the zone, radio twittering away in the background, the story is revealed to me. I am just a typist at this point. Ideas flow, change, mature, and continually surprise me. Until the middle bit. Where’s my roadmap? I’m lost. Do I zig, zag, go in reverse or just crash in a heap. Ignore it until it all starts demanding attention again, then I get through it. The end! Nothing to it, really. .
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I know the beginning and I know the end. It’s the middle part that always bugged me. That’s why my stories tend to become over-long. I digress too much. Too much filler. I didn’t have that trouble so much with the Ki’shto’ba books because they were based on Earth myths and legends, so the plotline was much clearer.
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I’m not the opposite … I don’t think I have enough filler.
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I’m a pantser too. I have an idea, then work out the beginning and the end. Working out how to get from one to the other is the hard part, but it works somehow. I have ideas, usually for the most interesting parts, and these usually come to me during the night – so I’m there tapping them into my phone in the dark to email to myself to develop the next day. Eventually I have to write the less-interesting-but-necessary parts that link all the important bits together. The entire process involves a lot of brain-dumping at the keyboard, often much repetition, and intricate sorting-out of the ensuing notes. It’s a mess, but somehow it turns into something intelligible – just don’t ask me how. Thanks for sharing and best of luck with yours. 🙂
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I’m glad I’m not alone!!!
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The hardest part of writing the story for me is when I’ve written myself into a corner and experience a failure of imagination. The easiest part is writing the first draft because I know it will be revised and revision because I know it will be revised.
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I’m with you on the way a book starts. I’m a pantser through and through. It isn;t that the middle is so hard for me, it’s that I struggle sometimes to think of enough things to fill the middle up before moving on to the ending. I want my books to always go more than 50k words (the minimum for BookBub), so I need to keep things moving beyond where I may have naturally stopped.
I can write a book in a month. I can take ten years to finish a book. I have a book that’s been at the ending since January, and I still can’t make up my mind who did it. That book will be done within 5,000 words. I should be able to finish it in two days. What is my problem! I think mostly it’s that I’m spending too much of my time on blogs and letting other distractions take over my life.
Good luck to you on getting a handle on your writing and finishing some of your projects/ideas!
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My first novel clocked in at 120,000 words until I put it through a couple of edits and cut it down to less than 100,000. My second and third novels were around 80,000. These days, I can’t seem to get past 30,000-35,000 words because … I can’t think of enough things to fill the middle and I also have gone ever further away from description and back story and what I’ll refer to as filler. I just want to tell the story and skip the fluff. I go back and read some of my earlier, longer pieces and marvel at what I did because I ain’t doing it now.
Your description of the book you’re working on sounds exactly like what I’m working on. I have no doubt that if I just buckled down I could finish it in a matter of days. For some reason, I just can’t do it though.
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Description and backstory – I, too, have tried to cut a lot of both out of my books. Do you think that’s a good thing? Maybe find a middle ground? I know I tend to skim backstory and heavy description when I read, so I don’t want to use either. But maybe I cut too much out? You, too?
I’m going to force myself to buckle down this month and finish that book. It’s absurd that I’m not doing it. I’m even sitting on two others that are finished and not published! I’ve become a master at procrastination.
Do you think if we pushed through and finished these books, the dam might break, and we could write better after? I can only hope.
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I don’t consciously set out to minimize description and back story. It just happens. I focus on telling the story and as I do that, a lot of the extraneous stuff falls apart. There is backstory in what I’m working on, but … I don’t know. It just seems I had more in older works along with more description and better transitions.
I’ve always been optimistic that finishing one story may open the door on my next project. So far, that optimism has remained unfulfilled. 😉
How about we both commit to finishing our current projects by the end of May?
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I’m in! 🙂
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We can do this!!!
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[Changing the order to match my process]
What’s the easiest part of a story for you?
The parts I think of as anchors.
Once something strikes me as a potentially fertile idea, the next thing my mind does is create a scene – often vague, consisting of two or three people interacting in dialogue. As continue to mull over the concept and perform research, other similar scenes will spring to mind, helping me sketch a broader story. The ones with the most potential, I will jot down some more dialogue with some contextual elements as well. These are the anchors. I tend to end up with one or two solid ones, which will more than likely make it into the book. By this point I have more concrete notions of how the tale starts and how it ends at the high level. Having been born out of the initial inspiration, I have a lot of creative energy around the anchors and having rough road map now, more anchors spring to mind. This is where I’m having the most fun.
What’s the hardest?
The parts I think of as bridges.
These are the unthought-of details that get me from anchor A to anchor B and so on. They’re not born of creative energy so much as from necessity or mechanics. I will charge out of the gate as the anchor grows, but then at some point I flag and the creative energy dies down before I get to the next anchor, and that’s when I need a bridge. The challenge is that I want the bridges to be as vibrant and as engaging as the anchors.
When it comes to those hard parts, are there any strategies you follow to get over the hump, to get past the difficulty and ease into the better parts of the story?
When I hit a particularly difficult gap, I skip it. I’ve discovered as the rest of the book fills out, I end up with more material that helps me create a bridge. Character’s motivations and circumstances may change and that allow me to go back and rethink the tough spots. For example, sometimes near the end, I can ascertain a character trait needing a bit more visibility or polish, so now the bridge can contain a slight diversion of interactions with ephemeral characters. in my second book, Perseus helping an old man who’s groceries had tumbled to the floor comes to mind.
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This is more or less my process, too. I like the “anchors and bridges” metaphor.
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You do something I’ve never been able to do. Write the easy parts first and then go back and fill in the hard parts. I think of doing that occasionally, particularly when I’ve got bogged down, but it never really works for me. With the piece I’m working on now, I did this at one point. I skipped ahead to the beginning of the ending and started writing it. I only wrote a few pages, but it helped me decide what the ending would be. It hasn’t helped me though with the bridge from where I was to that ending.
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Such a lot of good points among the comments here. My process is similar to what most of you pantsers have described, but my problem is I have a hard time starting until I can be sure I will complete a first draft. I always have a beginning and ending in mind, and some ideas for the middle, but as others have said, it’s making those middle scenes that’s hard. Especially if you do it in the form of little notes instead of actually sitting down and writing that first draft. Right now I have pages of notes for a novel, but have not yet felt ready to start writing.
I like Richard’s idea of anchors and bridges. I used that model for my first few books, but at that time I felt compelled to write the scenes that popped up without any effort on my part. Tying them together wasn’t as easy, but since the whole project felt “live” at that point, I didn’t have to force myself to work on it. It was more like I couldn’t stay away from it. The good old days…
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The anchors and bridges concept is interesting. I’ve never thought of writing that way, or a story that way. I think part of that is because of how I write. I start at the beginning and just keep going. And rarely does my writing mind jump ahead to something in the future of the story. Just step by step.
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I was interested to see how many people have trouble with the middle. My problem is I tend to improvise and I get dragged off on tangents. This was particularly true in The Man Who Found Birds among the Stars since it’s a biography in form, so you can’t really skip over any part of my MC’s life. That’s why I have vols. 5 and 6 – transitional material that contained some dull stuff and some really entertaining episodes.
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It appears a lot of people struggle with the middle.
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I’m writing a series, and the hardest part for me is drip-feeding the backstory of previous books into subsequent ones.
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Never having written a series, I can only imagine that challenge.
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Now. THIS is weird. Brought on by too much red wine tonight, I put my name spelt backwards in the google searchbar. My name is Gary Weston. I always knew spelt backwards, it actually looks like some actual foreign (to me) name. Notsew Yrag. And blow me over with a feather, Yrag Notsew came up on goodreads. Has a few books out, apparently. Check it out and maybe try your own.
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