The "Messy Middle" of Writing

Image by Bilge Can Gürer.

One of my students recently handed me a draft with the most accurate self-description I've encountered in years of teaching writing. Right at the top, he'd flagged his own work this way:

Vomit core of ideas tied together with semi-loose language. Inconsistent structuring, phrasing, and sourcing.

Reader, I laughed out loud.

Not because the draft was bad — it wasn't — but because he'd named the "messy middle" of writing so precisely. There was a core of ideas. They were tied together with semi-loose language. The structure was inconsistent.

That note told me three things about him as a writer:

• He knew his draft wasn't finished, and he didn't think it had to be before he showed it to me.

• He could already see the gap between where the draft was and where he wanted it to go.

• He was willing to say so out loud.

Those are the skills that separate writers who grow quickly from writers who stay stuck. Perfectionism keeps drafts hidden in desk drawers. Honest self-assessment gets them onto the page, where they can actually be developed.

Why does the "messy middle" of writing happen?

All writers start, just as my student did, with an awesome idea in our heads, but then somehow it becomes a tangled mess of black and white words on a screen that make no sense to another human. Our brilliant thinking refuses to cohere.

It's uncomfortable. It can make us feel like failed writers. And it doesn't come with a neat checklist for fixing. But whenever you find yourself here, please, please keep reminding yourself that this is absolutely, 100 percent, fully and completely normal. In fact, if you weren't struggling, I'd bet you all kinds of money that you weren't writing anything worth reading. You've either just written a summary of your materials or you've filled your page with clichés like "avoid it like the plague" and "since the beginning of time."

Advice for developing writers often relies on template-style techniques. Brainstorming? Here's a mind map. Outlining? Here's a five-part structure. Thesis development? Here's a formula. I teach these for sure, and they're critical first steps when you're learning to write (because, spoiler alert, writing is hard and no one really knows how to do it at first).

But the art of turning brainstorming and outlining and a preliminary thesis into an artful argument or meaningful experience for your readers? Well, that's not a template process, especially once you move past the five-paragraph essay and you must maintain your thesis across many pages and your paragraphs need to interlock as intricately as jigsaw puzzle pieces.

Writing is not a checklist. It is a rough-and-tumble, often-circular, process of ideation, drafting, review, and revision. This repeating process is like squeezing juice from oranges— messy, wet, tiresome—and you have to keep squeezing until you've wrung all the liquid gold out of the rinds and pulp and pith.

How to get through the "messy middle" of writing

If you're in the middle of a draft right now and feeling the chaos, here's what I'd suggest:

Keep your thesis in front of your eyeballs. Literally. Paste it at the top of your document or write it on a sticky note that stays on your computer monitor. When you start to feel at sea, when the what the heck am I trying to say again? thought strikes, you'll have an anchor keep you grounded.

Write and keep handy a very simple outline. Not as a vow before your God of the final form your paper will take, but as a compass. A reminder of where you intended to get to when you began your expedition. You might change your destination or your path there, but without a compass you're just wandering in the wilderness.

Let the vomit core exist. Your first pass through a section does not have to be good. It just has to exist. You can't revise a blank page.

Flag what needs developing, but keep drafting. My student's instinct to label his draft's weaknesses isn't a sign of insecurity—it's a sign of craft. Leave yourself developmental notes: awkward transition here, need a better source, this paragraph wants to be two paragraphs, say more about this later, insert better word here. I like to put these notes in square brackets as I draft. This way you can register your editing thoughts without letting them stop the drafting momentum.

The messy middle isn't a detour from writing. It is writing. And the writers who can keep on juicing those oranges—without panicking, without forfeiting, without pretending the juicing should look tidier than it does—are the ones who produce a final version.

So if your current draft is a vomit core of ideas tied together with semi-loose language? Congratulations. You're right where you're supposed to be.

Image: Image by Bilge Can Gürer from Pixabay.