Into the Weeds: How to enjoy the middle of the project
It’s that time of year when everything turns pumpkin spice. Whether you are ready or not, you start seeing pumpkin spice muffin mix at Trader Joe’s, and pumpkin spice lattes make their entrance onto menu boards of every local (and global) cafe.
But here’s the thing:
It’s still in the mid-to-high-80s where I live. So in our house, we don’t do pumpkin spice until October. It just seems wrong. Oh sure, we buy the shelf-stable things in September when they are plentiful. (We know they’ll be gone by October to make room for Christmas-themed gingerbread kits.)
But we try to wait to bake the muffins or the cake or brew the coffee until it’s October 1.
While I talked about this strange family rite of passage with my son this week, he said it just doesn’t feel like fall yet. (The leaves have barely started turning a lesser shade of green–much less change colors altogether.)
Why is October 1 special? The waiting of September brings us joy on October 1st.
When we tear into the pumpkin spice before October, it loses its appeal quickly. Tossed aside into the recycling bin, the boxes of seasonal flavors have come and gone if we open them too early. But waiting until October builds anticipation, excitement, something cozy to look forward to.
Like a dinner guest at a party (Salman Rushdie tells a great story about this), the anticipation of the guest is built by planning the menu, cooking the food, and preparing the table. If I could talk to other writers, I believe they’d tell you that the joy of being in the middle of the project–whether it is a novel or an essay or a short story or research for an article–is because it’s the settling-in stage.
It is the stage of writing where you know firmly what you are writing about and you are pretty sure about where it will go (or at least you’ve decided some of the key elements to come).
But the middle is where you get to enjoy the ride.
You’re not remiss at what could have been included (you’re not at the end yet), and you are not overwhelmed at what you want to say (as in the beginning). Like a roller coaster that was scary and overwhelming as you scaled the first hill, beginning a book or an article can seem like a feat of mammoth proportions at first. And when you finish that roller coaster ride, the exhilaration and speed and strength of the machine is all a memory. One that faded fast and was over too soon. At the end of a book, you know the ending.
However, the middle is where you take your reader into the weeds.
You hunt for evidence of tiny buds and shoots, little wildflowers that you’d have missed otherwise. Pulling out the rejected stickyweed and stinging nettle from your pants legs, you trudge through to find the beauty that remains.
It’s like this with writing.
Deep in details and building tension and unfolding your character arc, you find a joy that can’t be arrived at any other way: waiting. Waiting as you write, keypunch after keypunch, day after day. Waiting to see what will come of these characters you love, these places or ideas you’ve researched, and this world you have created (fiction) or retold (nonfiction) from your point of view.
Sure, it’s messy. There are thorns that jump up and threaten to squelch your belief that you’ll find any gold here at all. But if you wait, and if you examine deeper, you will find that, as with your dinner guest, asking questions in the middle of the book is the crescendo of waiting for that dinner guest to show up, eat food, drink and listen. Because now, now you get to hear their thoughts on the day’s events, and you get to listen to their beliefs and their everyday struggles or joys… and you get to come out a little bit different because that person came to your dinner table.
When you wait while writing, hitting backspace a million times, you find that the middle of the book or article is what connects the kind of author you were at the beginning to the person you are at the end.
A little bit different.
