Most Underrated Writing Advice that No One Ever Tells You

Your book needs to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Everyone knows this... except for authors. As soon as you start plotting out your book, or even when you just start it with no outline or planning before that point, you know that eventually you'll have to create that dreaded middle part. Or that you'll eventually have to figure out how your book ends. Or maybe you never even started writing because you know what the middle and end are like, but you have no clue how it all starts.

This was my problem with Emmett's Story. Specifically, I had no middle. I knew how it started, and I knew how it ended, and I had no idea how to take my book from Part A to Part C. So, I kept doing something that seemed counterintuitive: I kept writing future chapters. I had no idea what lead up to them, or how they connected to my beginning parts, but my ending chapters were so exciting! I didn't want to wait until I figured the rest of it out to write them!

The entire process I kept doing that. If I had a good idea for a future chapter or already knew about a future event in the story and felt bored by where I was currently, I'd go ahead and write that future bit. For the longest time I actually thought that I was basically just wasting time when I let my impulsivity and impatience get the best of me like that, but I just wanted to be able to write something that felt fun and exciting in the moment.

Because I couldn't connect it to anything from the start, I always felt like it was the opposite of progress. Like I was on a sidequest, and wasn't advancing the main story at all. But then, something surprised me. One day, I finished a future chapter and I figured out how to connect the existing to it. Then, another, and another, and before I knew it, I had created an entire plotline that ran through the rest of the book, connecting the beginning to the end through unwritten middle chapters. I finally realized that by creating my finish line before any of the path leading up to it, I already knew exactly where and how to end my book. After that, it was just connecting the dots, seeing where I was and where I needed to be and asking myself "what's a reasonable way to get my characters there?"

The first 75% of my book took almost four years to write. The last 25% took less than four months. Closer to two, actually. So much of it was already there, I just had keep building bridges across chapters now. Some of those future chapters I was never even sure would be a part of the final manuscript. But once I could clearly see two parts of the equation in front of me, the final pieces made themselves obvious to me. It was like looking at 7 + __ = 10. Not only did working backwards give me the missing piece, but it meant that the equation, my book, was finally finished once I filled in the blank.

Now, I constantly utilize this method, switching to a new place in the story any time I get bored or stuck. Even just reading those future chapters when I have writer's block is a brilliant way to find inspiration for what to write next. The next time you get stuck, do the same! Write what you do know for sure about your story, the rest will come in time! A habit that I thought was just the ADHD goblin in my brain demanding stimulation turned out to actually be one of the greatest tools in my writer's toolbox.

So, just to recap, we all know that your book needs to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. But there's no law that says they have to be in that order, right?