Your Middle is Broken Because Your Beginning Doesn’t Work

If you have written a novel, chances are you have experienced the Sticky Middle. This is where, after whizzing through the first few chapters, you hit a wall. The words won’t come, you don’t know what scene to write next, your characters are meandering about with no purpose. Or maybe you only noticed it when you were reading your first draft, and realised that things… slow… right… down… Nothing is happening, your characters are treading water or going round in circles. It’s painful to read.

There is lots of advice for this around: Throw in a plot twist! Move the goalposts! Raise the stakes! Add a new character! Add a new subplot!

These things can work – but only if they solve the actual problem. If you just add in a new character when the issue wasn’t that there weren’t enough characters to support the story, all you have is a Sticky Middle with an extra character wading around in it. Or a plot twist that doesn’t feel earned or has no payoff. Or the stakes are raised but the character is still not getting any closer to achieving their goal.

You need to know why the middle is feeling sticky before you can fix it – and sometimes the answer isn’t adding something extra to the middle, it’s looking critically at the beginning and making sure that works.

Here are four examples of Sticky Middles I’ve come across multiple times as an editor, with the specific reasons the drafts stalled – and how I would fix them. So if you are finding that your writing has got a bit… sticky, see if any of these scenarios resonate – and ask yourself if the beginning of your book might be the problem.

1. What the beginning promised us turns out not to matter

Your book opens with all your characters planning to attend a specific event, and the first few chapters – perhaps even the first half – circles around and around the run-up. Or maybe you have a prologue flashing forward to show a certain moment in the plot, with the implicit promise that that is going to be a huge turning point in the story. Or it might be more subtle – there’s mention of a secret someone is keeping, or something a character needs to find.

All of those are going to leave the reader expecting that when we get to this moment – the day of the event arrives, we hit the scene shown in the prologue, the secret is revealed or the lost item found – it is going to change everything.

If it doesn’t – if the event passes without a hitch, the secret is underwhelming and the characters don’t care – then it is going to feel anticlimactic.

Even if the moment is bigger – the secret is shocking! – but it still doesn’t change anything, it’s still going to feel anticlimactic. You can reveal that your protagonist killed someone in earlier life, but if it doesn’t matter – if their relationships remain unchanged because of it, their life continues to run as normal – then your reader is going to feel short-changed.

You need to make the event you foreshadowed matter more – by having ramifications that affect the plot going forwards – or to change the focus of your opening so that it is less leading.

Really what we want to see is that each of your plot points leads on to the next – that your book is not just a series of events happening one after the other, but a chain of events, a line of dominos falling one after another, each pushing the next as it falls.

If your one of your characters reveals a secret, or confesses their love for someone, or stumbles across a hidden map, that should have a clear impact on what happens next. The secret or the fact that it’s been revealed should change what the character does next – so that what comes afterwards wouldn’t have happened if the secret hadn’t been revealed.

If things happen with no consequences, then you lose impact and the tension dissolves – and if we’ve been waiting for that thing to happen then it will feel distinctly underwhelming when nothing comes of it.