Day one runs on adrenaline, and day five is the finish line, but day three is just you and a document that stopped being exciting and hasn’t started being finished.
This is the day the doubt shows up sounding perfectly reasonable, suggesting that you go back and fix chapter one before you go any further, or that this whole book might be a mistake worth reconsidering. It always shows up now, because now is when the sugar wears off.
So let’s talk about the middle, since that’s where you are in the week and probably where you are in the book.
The middle is where most drafts go to die, and it’s almost never because the writer ran out of ideas. It’s because the middle is where you have to stop introducing and start complicating. Every scene in the front half was a promise. Everything in the middle has to be a cost. If your couple has been circling each other for six chapters and nothing has been taken from either of them yet, the story has gone flat and you can feel it, which is exactly why today feels like this.
Ask what it costs your characters to keep doing the thing they’ve been doing. Then make them pay it. Not a misunderstanding, not a phone call at the wrong moment. An actual loss, chosen, that they walk into with their eyes open because they can’t stand the alternative anymore. That’s what makes a middle move.
The same rule applies to you this week. You don’t get the ending because you deserve it. You get it because you kept showing up on the day it stopped feeling good.
Nobody who ever finished a draft did it because day three was fun.
See you at eleven.
xo, Tasha
