Muddling over the Middle

[lizvogel]

Apocollapse has been badly stalled for a while now. Partly that's because middles are like that; I usually hit a point of being bored to death with my own story right around this point, and it's not a function of quality, just of being in the middle-to-two-thirds. Partly that's because I needed some vital research, which involved wandering around a truck stop convenience store last Sunday taking notes until the manager came over to make sure I wasn't a stray, unattended vendor. ;-) Partly I've got a couple chunks of just-get-words-down that are in the way and will have to go. :-( But part of it is something else, and yes, an old Pat Wrede post was the key to what:

To my way of thinking, what the middle part of a story needs is the sense that we’re getting somewhere. That doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a physical journey involved; “getting somewhere” can just as easily mean slowly whittling down the list of suspects in a murder mystery, or the deepening relationship between the main characters of a Romance novel, or any number of other things that make the reader feel as if something important is coming closer and closer.
[...]
Most often, the sense of progress in the middle of the story is expressed as an increase in tension – as time and the story go on, the situation keeps getting worse despite all the main characters’ efforts – but there are other ways to keep the middle moving. Increasing apprehension (where the actual physical situation is not any worse, but the characters are finding out more and more reasons to be worried) is one; increasing urgency is another (where there’s some sort of time limit: the cure must be found before the patient deteriorates past a certain point, the bomb must be disarmed before the countdown timer reaches zero, the dress must be finished by the afternoon before prom night). The main character’s emotional involvement with the problem, or with some other character, can increase over the middle of the story; his/her self-knowledge can grow; the amount of information the character (and thus the reader) has about the central story problem and/or its solution can grow.

Right now, my characters have come to a resting point. They've achieved food and water; neither is a permanent solution, but it's long-term enough that they can catch their breath and start thinking beyond the next five minutes. They've established a functional means of working together. There's another major threat coming soon, but they don't know about it yet, and there's some day-to-day life stuff (apocalypse-style) that has to happen before it puts in an appearance (and that will actually trigger it, so I can't skip it). Basically, there's an interlude of wax-on-wax-off-paint-fence where the characters aren't making visible progress. It's brief, and it shouldn't be boring to read because I'll gloss over most of it and dress up what remains, but it's boring as hell to write.

Oddly enough, I was thinking recently about season 6 of Lucifer, which we're halfway through watching, and it's really dragging because he's stalling on taking over the job he finally got after a season of trying, and she's resigned from the job that defined her character, so they're both basically just waiting around. It's getting damned hard to watch, because the shiny is still there but the progress is not.

I can't skip the not-getting-somewhere part, but now that I know that's what it is, it feels like I can brush through it and get on to the next development. Which is what I was trying to do anyway, but knowing why it's boring the snot out of me makes it easier to deal with.