Thanks! I'm sure you've never had a muddle in the middle though. *grin*
Truthfully? I get the middle-of-the-book blues, in which I feel everything is flat & uninteresting & I am worthless as a writer all of the time, and I find them paralyzing because at the point I question every single word I've written, except two (my name).
But if I'm writing 200 pages of stuff that has to go, it's going to be at the beginning, as I'm trying to find my way into the book with six or eight different chapter ones (twice! this time, once for prologue and once for the actual chapter one), or it's going to be 600 pages and almost a white page rewrite if I'm trying to force a book to an end that it can't actually get to because I'm trying desperately to tie things up so as not to annoy people (Sea of Sorrows).
This is possible because: I start a book and I know what the end is. And then I write half the book and realize that the end is not actually only half a book away, but I know where the end of this one is now. And then I phone Sheila and I grovel.
There's always an overall arc to the book I'm working on - but it often ends up being the mid-point arc, if that makes any sense, because the end I was aiming for can't actually be reached in the book I'm working on now (most any book; Riven Shield was part of Sun Sword until the manuscript was, ummm, already way too long (and before I had finished the whole thing -- I think it was 2000 pages when I accepted that, even though I'd been telling every single one of my readers that I was writing the last book for a year and a half, it wasn't quite only one book >.<)
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2008-05-15 03:47 pm (UTC)Truthfully? I get the middle-of-the-book blues, in which I feel everything is flat & uninteresting & I am worthless as a writer all of the time, and I find them paralyzing because at the point I question every single word I've written, except two (my name).
But if I'm writing 200 pages of stuff that has to go, it's going to be at the beginning, as I'm trying to find my way into the book with six or eight different chapter ones (twice! this time, once for prologue and once for the actual chapter one), or it's going to be 600 pages and almost a white page rewrite if I'm trying to force a book to an end that it can't actually get to because I'm trying desperately to tie things up so as not to annoy people (Sea of Sorrows).
This is possible because: I start a book and I know what the end is. And then I write half the book and realize that the end is not actually only half a book away, but I know where the end of this one is now. And then I phone Sheila and I grovel.
There's always an overall arc to the book I'm working on - but it often ends up being the mid-point arc, if that makes any sense, because the end I was aiming for can't actually be reached in the book I'm working on now (most any book; Riven Shield was part of Sun Sword until the manuscript was, ummm, already way too long (and before I had finished the whole thing -- I think it was 2000 pages when I accepted that, even though I'd been telling every single one of my readers that I was writing the last book for a year and a half, it wasn't quite only one book >.<)
But: I love endings.
ETA: too many typos >.<. Need coffee >.