Or maybe two days late if you call and ask really nicely.) Then, just before you sit down to write again, think about the critical plot points that are yet to come. Your editor doesn’t want a crappy book on time. Borrow your son’s Legos and build a scale model replica of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano. (Preferably thick, cake-like chocolate chip cookies.) Mail those cookies to your favorite noveldoctor. Here’s the best way to fix it: do something that doesn’t involve writing. You know exactly where you’re going, but you just can’t get there from here. That’s why writer fatigue is so frustrating. After all, you do have an amazing plot worked out for the story, right? Of course you do.
Writer fatigue isn’t quite the same thing as writer’s block. The solution to writer fatigue is simple: take a break. Sometimes it happens when you’re feeling the pressure of a deadline. Sometimes it happens when you try to write after a long, long, long, long day. Sometimes this happens when you sit too long in the same place. And you don’t notice even after reading and re-reading the paragraph six times. Another clue is that you start to write the same sentence over and over again. You’ll know this is the root cause when you start to write metaphors and similes that are as weak as other things that are weak. There are two main reasons for this struggle, and it’s important to know which is your root cause before you try to fix it. (We hates them, we does.) But most writers I know struggle here. Some feel practically giddy when they hit the midpoint, then frolic to the finish line without the least bit of gastric or career distress. Not every writer struggles with the Middle of Uncertainty. Oh, and sometimes? You don’t realize you have a Middle of Uncertainty until the whole damn book is written and you’re starting work on your second draft. Or perhaps worst of all, beginning to fear that the rest of the book won’t live up to the first pages.
It’s the place where you’re suddenly stymied. Just what is the Middle of Uncertainty? Well, it’s a lot of things, but in the simplest of terms, it’s that place where you start to lose hope/interest/momentum in this novel that you were certain was going to be a beautiful saga of love, loss, redemption and werewolves.
I just made it up because it sounds imposing). The lucky ones make it to 40 or 50K before they start to wade through it. For some, it happens around the 30,000th word.
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