Midpoint magic ✨

And learning to trust my creative instincts

Photo by Greg Rakozy

It didn’t matter that my editor and writing partners said otherwise—I was convinced there was something “missing” with my story.

I’m the youngest of three children, so my knee-jerk reaction is rejecting the status quo. Still, it felt wrong to finish a draft that didn’t feel solid; nor did I want to embark on a seventh revision. So I spent another few months following the Internet’s insipid advice on handling writer’s block.

“Go for a walk! Take the day off! Try shifting to another writing project! Have you heard of this plotting method?”

Pre-having my daughter, I would have shut out the world and devoted all hours to studying the craft of writing. But I was dead set on continuing work on this book without massive interruption to my family and routine. There have been too many times I’ve burned out from the zeal of taking on a new project, so I made it clear that my new book coach that our partnership would only work if I still had time to work out every morning, cook dinner five nights a week, publish this newsletter twice a month, and sleep six to seven hours a night.

The surefire way of knowing if a coach is worth their salt is laying out your constraints upfront and gauging their reaction. If you sense disdain or judgment regarding your life’s must-haves, then it won’t be a productive working relationship.

As a mother of two herself, my coach wasn’t deterred. We started off with a rundown of my strengths—character development and emotionally driven prose. It took three months for us to pinpoint that I had inadvertently woven three different genres together, and another month of dissecting each to understand how they worked together to challenge and elevate the character arc. Then we moved to scene work, which felt like my first year of graduate school again. I would brainstorm ten ideas for a single Act, get prodded with a gentle, “Why should I care?”, repeat that process five times before moving onto the next—and we weren’t even halfway through plotting the story.

I seriously wondered if this was one of those projects that needed to be shelved because it was my first book and the first of any creative endeavor is almost always terrible.

When I originally started to self-diagnose my plotting problems, I had picked up James Scott Bell’s Write Your Novel from the Middle, who refers to the Midpoint of a story as the “look in the mirror” moment:

At this point in the story, the character looks at himself. He takes stock of where he is in the conflict…wondering what kind of person he is. What is he becoming? If he continues the fight of Act II, how will he be different? What will he have to do to overcome his inner challenges? How will he have to change in order to battle successfully?

Until that point, I had been hanging onto my coach’s every word. Every book she referenced, I would purchase or check out from the library, studying it from cover to cover. Even when my daughter missed multiple days of school because of incessant colds, I would submit my homework on time. It wasn’t until I mustered the courage to push back on a deadline, analyzed the approved scenes, and rewrote them in a plot synopsis that I finally discovered that my Midpoint had been there all along—I just needed to present the information differently.

To elaborate on the process would discount the magic of the moment—I may be deft with my words, but even I recognize the limitations of language.

What has surprised me most is how quickly one can advance in their craft if they stumble upon a coach who is skilled enough to offer guidance; while also allowing their student to sit in the discomfort of not knowing the answer. Of helping them understand that there is no resolution, only liberation. I love meeting deadlines and hitting word counts, but I’m also learning to embrace the process of holding onto an idea for longer than what feels comfortable, iterating and reshaping it until I’m bursting with inspiration and sprinting to the keyboard to execute.

The journey is far from over because I still have to write the darn thing. I’ve mapped out the itinerary, but need to pack and depart for the trip. I have no idea if my years of labor will result in any of the markers that indicate when a writer has “made it”—an agent or book deal, awards or a coveted spot on a bestseller’s list. The market’s fluctuations are out of my control, but at least I know the path forward.

If anything, it’s a reminder to trust my creative instincts above all else, even when the world is eager for me to finish.

Now over to you:

1. Tell me about a coach or mentor that’s been instrumental to your creative practice. How have they changed the way you approach your craft?

2. How do you typically handle advice and feedback? What are your methods for processing and taking action (or not)?

3. Have you encountered a Midpoint moment in your life? What was your worldview beforehand, and how did it shift afterwards?

Leave me a comment and let me know.

Cheers,

Sophia :)

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P.S. The last time I wrote about the book, it revolved around releasing myself from a self-imposed deadline. In case you missed it, the link is below.