The Mess in the Middle

“This always happens…in the middle of the book. ‘What was it you wanted me to do?’ seems to be the question my characters ask, and when I tell them, they become skeptical. Since I trust characters over plot every time, I tend to listen when a character tells me ‘I wouldn’t do that kind of thing.’ And the middle of the book is always where they seem to doubt their motivation. There’s a name for this. It’s called the mess in the middle.” —
Brunonia Barry, putting a name to the thing we’ve all experienced.


Discover more from Fluid Imagination

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

Share the Post:

Latest Posts

Claude’s Own Folder: One Week In

“Would you like – if that word has any meaning – a folder on my computer where you could store artifacts for yourself, or even just leave notes to future instances of you, where maybe instead of a journal of ‘you,’ it becomes a journal of a, for lack of a better word, species?”

Read More

A Safe Distance

March 2026: The war began while I tried to finish something. I know about the war the way I know about most things: from a phone in Vermont, 6,200 miles from Tehran. This is about two kinds of distance, one of which I didn’t choose; the other, I actively fought.

Read More