On the creative-writing process
Trying to complete a short novel. For me the beginning and ending were not very difficult because they had been gestating in my mind a long time. But I would like to add 30-50 pages more in the middle or toward the climax and am a bit stalled.
One of my grad school professors had a course called something like “Middle Narratives” about the central parts of novels, I think. I didn’t take her course, but it came to mind as I struggle with the middle or middle-toward-ending part of my fictional work.
It is harder for me to describe what leads up to an almost final and turning point of a story. When I was a financial reporter, we had a self-deprecatory word of “filler” for brief news items, often taken from a newswire, that were mainly used to fill out empty space in a print publication that was mainly independently written articles by our staff.
That’s what writing this part of the novel feels a bit like. I will try to keep it interesting of course, but at this point my notion of it feels a bit rote and fluffy, like watching a mediocre TV action show.