Caution Slump Ahead!

Authors Note: I wrote this way back in July, but am only just now publishing it, I’m not sure why I didn’t publish this at the time, but suffice it to say I felt it was interesting enough for my promised second post of the day. 

There are moments in the writing process in which it seems as though everything is going great. The story is flowing faster than your fingers can type (or write if you still prefer handwritten things as I occasionally do), the characters are communicating with you and you start to feel as though you might actually be able to knock out a few chapters in a matter of days. And then it hits you. Slowly, like a cold front moving in, unexpected, and lingering. The slump. That horrible moment when nothing seems to go right and the story refuses to budge.

As I attempt my edits of my current work-in-progress, I found myself forced to rewrite nearly six chapters in which my story had been suffering from the sagging middle syndrome. The six chapters in question felt… uninteresting and unimportant. I’d been trying to solve a problem within this story for the better part of the last few months. When you build up a setting to be almost like a character in itself, how do you deal with the agonizing realization that the scene at hand in your shiny new setting is really a let down. For the better part of six chapters.

If the phrase kill your darlings refers to pulling the plug on anything that seems extraneous or otherwise does not pull the story along then I definitely felt that I had done the job. Literally within the context of the story. I had recussatated a chapter by burning the scene to the ground.