“My middle is a disaster.” “I think I broke my story.” “Everything’s falling apart in Act Two and I don’t know how to fix it.”

Sound familiar? If you’re a writer who’s ever uttered these words—or something equally despairing—while staring at your manuscript or screenplay, take a deep breath. That “disaster” you’re lamenting? It might just be your story working exactly as it should.

November 2025: The Things They Carry

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The middle isn’t broken. You haven’t failed as a writer. And that beautiful mess you’re creating? It’s where the real magic happens.

Reframing the “Saggy Middle” Syndrome

Let’s start by demolishing the most damaging myth in storytelling: that a good middle should feel tidy and controlled. This misconception has sent more writers into spiral of self-doubt than any other craft “rule” I know.

The middle—Act Two, the bulk of your novel, episodes 3-7 of your limited series—is supposed to feel messy. It’s where your characters’ lives get complicated, where their comfortable assumptions crumble, where they make mistakes that matter. If your middle feels neat and predictable, that’s when you should worry.

Think about your own life. When did you grow the most as a person? Probably not during those peaceful stretches when everything went according to plan. You grew during the messy times—when you lost the job, moved across the country, fell in love with the wrong person, or faced your deepest fears. Your characters need that same beautiful messiness to become fully human.

The Middle as Character Crucible

Here’s what the middle really is: it’s your character’s crucible. It’s where they get heated up, broken down, and reformed into who they need to become. And crucibles, by definition, are not comfortable places.

In Killers of the Flower Moon, the middle doesn’t shy away from Ernest Burkhart’s moral disintegration. Each choice he makes—from the initial conspiracy to the final betrayal—forces him to confront his own capacity for evil. It’s messy, uncomfortable, and morally complex. It’s also riveting because it feels authentically human.

Similarly, Yellowjackets keeps both its timelines taut through parallel messiness: as the teen survivors descend further into primal brutality in the past, their adult selves’ carefully constructed facades crumble in the present. The mess isn’t a bug—it’s the feature.

The Art of Progressive Complications (Or: How to Keep Throwing Things at Your Characters)

Here’s where screenwriters and prose writers can learn from each other. Film and television excel at what I call “progressive complications”—each new obstacle doesn’t just create external problems, it forces internal recalibration.

The Three-Layer Complication System:

1. Surface Level: The immediate, visible problem (the car breaks down, the deadline moves up, the love interest’s ex returns)
2. Character Level: How this problem challenges the protagonist’s beliefs, skills, or comfort zone (forces them to ask for help when they’re fiercely independent, demands they confront their fear of commitment)
3. Thematic Level: How this complication serves the story’s deeper questions (what does it mean to be self-reliant? how do we balance career and relationships?)

The best middles layer these complications like a Russian nesting doll. Each problem contains and reveals deeper problems, creating the kind of narrative momentum that makes readers forget they need to sleep.

Try This: Exercise #1 – The Worst-Case Internal Scenario When plotting your middle, don’t ask: “What’s the worst thing that could happen to my character externally?” Ask instead: “What’s the worst thing that could happen to them internally, right now?” List your protagonist’s three greatest strengths from Act One For each strength, identify how it could become a liability when taken to extremes or applied wrongly Choose the most interesting strength-turned-weakness and write a scene where this creates genuine problems for your character Maybe your protagonist’s perfectionism—which served them well in Act One—now prevents them from taking the risks necessary to solve their central problem. Maybe their loyalty, once their greatest strength, becomes the weakness that nearly destroys everything they love.

The Permission to Get Lost (Temporarily)

Here’s something no writing guru wants to admit: sometimes you need to let yourself get lost in the middle. Not permanently, and not without purpose, but temporarily. This is especially true for prose writers, who have more room to explore than screenwriters working within tight page counts.

Getting lost doesn’t mean abandoning all structure. It means allowing your characters to surprise you, following interesting tangents for a few pages, letting scenes develop organically rather than forcing them to hit predetermined plot points.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin demonstrates this beautifully. The middle sections that delve into game design, friendship dynamics, and creative passion could have been “saggy” in lesser hands. Instead, they become the emotional heart of the story because Zevin trusts that character exploration is just as compelling as plot advancement.

Screen vs. Page: Different Tools, Same Goal

For Screenwriters: Your middle needs to maintain visual momentum while deepening character. Use your format’s strengths:

• Physical actions that reveal internal states
• Dialogue that operates on multiple levels
• Visual metaphors that comment on character growth
• Scene transitions that compress time while showing change

For Prose Writers: You have the luxury of interiority. Use it wisely:

• Internal monologue that shows evolving thought patterns
• Sensory details that reflect character’s emotional state
• Memory and backstory that recontextualizes current events
• Multiple perspectives that reveal different facets of the central conflict

For Both: Remember that the middle is about transformation, not just complication. Every mess your character faces should change them in some small way.

The Television Advantage (And What Prose Writers Can Learn From It)

Television shows like The Bear, Succession, and Yellowjackets excel at middles because they understand something that single-sitting mediums sometimes forget: the middle is where we fall in love with characters.

It’s not the pilot episode that hooks viewers long-term—it’s episode four, when we’ve seen the characters in enough situations to understand their patterns. It’s episode six, when their flaws have been fully revealed but we care about them anyway.

Prose writers can learn from this: don’t rush through your middle trying to get to the “good stuff” at the end. The middle is the good stuff. It’s where readers become invested enough to care about your ending.

Try This: Exercise #2 – The Investment Audit Take any compelling TV show you’ve watched past the third episode and ask yourself: What did you know about the main character in episode 1? What additional layers were revealed by episode 4? Which flaws or complications made you care about them more, not less? Now apply this to your own story: What new facet of your protagonist gets revealed every 25-50 pages? If a reader started your story at page 100, what would they learn about your character that they wouldn’t know from page 1?

Practical Tools for Navigating the Beautiful Mess

The Escalation Check: Every 25 pages (or 10-15 script pages), ask:

• Are the stakes higher than they were 25 pages ago?
• Has my character been forced to make a choice that reveals something new about them?
• Would a reader/viewer who started here be lost, or could they jump in mid-story?

If your character could have made the same choices on page 100 that they made on page 50, your middle needs more heat.

The Mirror Moment Technique: Somewhere around the middle of your middle, give your character a moment of reflection—literal or metaphorical mirror time. What do they see when they look at themselves now? How has it changed from Act One? This moment often reveals the story’s theme.

The Pressure Cooker Principle: Just when your character thinks they’ve figured out how to handle the situation, remove their coping mechanism. Escalate the pressure, then escalate it again. The middle is where comfortable solutions stop working.

Exercise #3: The Coping Mechanism Assassination

1. Identify your character’s primary coping strategy—how do they typically handle stress or conflict?
2. Create a scenario in your middle where this strategy not only fails but makes things worse
3. Write the scene where they realize their old approach isn’t working and must try something completely different

Examples: The planner whose careful schemes backfire spectacularly. The people-pleaser whose agreement makes everyone angry. The loner who discovers they desperately need help but has burned all their bridges.

Why the Mess Matters More Than the Resolution

Here’s the secret that many writers don’t realize until they’re deep into their careers: readers and viewers often remember the middle more vividly than the ending. They remember how they felt while watching Walter White make increasingly desperate choices, not just the final scene in the lab. They remember Elizabeth Gilbert’s journey through grief and self-discovery in Eat, Pray, Love, not just her final epiphany.

The middle is where your story lives. It’s where characters become human, where themes emerge naturally from action, where readers bond with your fictional world strongly enough to recommend it to friends.

Embracing the Beautiful Mess

So the next time you find yourself stuck in what feels like a hopeless tangle of subplots, character complications, and thematic confusion, remember: this might be exactly where you need to be. The middle isn’t supposed to be neat. It’s supposed to be alive.

Your job isn’t to avoid the mess—it’s to shape it into something meaningful. To let your characters struggle and grow and surprise you. To trust that readers and viewers are smart enough to follow you through the complexity, and invested enough to want to.

The middle is where stories become art. Lean into the beautiful mess. Your characters—and your audience—will thank you for it.

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Next Time You’re Writing: Instead of asking “How do I fix this mess?” try asking “How can I make this mess more beautiful?” The answer might just unlock the heart of your story.