Hello dear writers, I am planning on a novel right now and I currently have a beginning and an ending. What I need now is a main part that connects these two strong and meaningful parts of the book and I have the fear that my main part gets too weak, because I have such a strong ending. I will share the details now. My book is about a young woman who gets a new job. The beginning of the book is about who she is, how she get's into her work and there is the first hint on the main problem in the book. She has a particular coworker who has a bad opinion on her. My main character does really well in her new job and her coworker doesn't like this. So she starts manipulating her work and the transition between the beginning and the main part will be, that the coworker manipulates the work by the main character, which upsets her boss about the main character. The main part is my problem, in here things rise. The bad coworker still shows envy on the main protagonist and starts inflicting wrong guilt onto her and starts sending her harassment mails. The transition between the main part and the ending is a really bad manipulation, where the clients of the main character get involved. The protagonist prescribes the clients a treatment and the coworker, takes that prescription and fakes that professionally to a fake treatment. The client get's aware of the wrong treatment and is really pissed about the protagonist and starts threatening her. During this part, the protagonist finds a love interest in the office. Now we get to the ending and from here things get heavy. So the boss is confused about the protagonist: she always made so much efforts and now she does things like that. He suspends her for a short time, to get some rest. During the suspension, the protagonist feels extreme guilt by what she did. She knows, she prescribed the right treatment but how did the client got the wrong one? It makes her feeling like going insane. On one day, she takes a knife in her hand and places it on her wrist, because she can't deal with the guilt of how she destroyed the clients life. She doesn't kill herself. When she get's back to work, she is super anxious about doing something wrong again. Then that client comes and she gets a panic attack and then faints, she unluckily falls with her head against a flower pot and falls into a short coma. During that coma she has like a dream, that she is dying now, but a voice (her loved grandmother) tells her, she wont die. She wakes up in the hospital. There she finds out her coworker did all these bad things to manipulate and gaslight her. She will tell her boss but the coworker fights back and tells the boss about her weak mental state. Stuff happens and she finally gets the truth out to the boss. Then it ends with her slowly recovering from her depression + anxiety. Well. The end is so strong and long and I doubt that the main part can keep up with the ending. I would ask: what would you do in that case? Make the mid section (main part) longer or divide that book into four parts? beginning: getting to know the circumtances part 2: things getting more intense part 3: the really bad stuff part 4: during and after the coma? I don't know what to do. D= Did someone had a similiar experience? Have a good week!
I’m no expert, but it seems like you have a beginning you like and an end you like and so you’re dedicated to that. What you’re doing seems like you’re saying “I’m in London and I want to get to Tokyo- how do I do it?” However it might be that you’re in a position where you have lead and want to turn it into gold. Not that lead is bad and gold is good, but that one thing can’t always get you to another. I’ve done this so many times. One idea I’ve had for over a decade begins with one scenario and ends moving through another. In my head they go together fine, but when I sit to do the finer details they really don’t. It can’t be done, so I left that idea behind and started something new until I can finally start with the beginning and see what it naturally unfolds to. The journey is the bit we read. The destination makes it satisfactory but only because of the journey before it. An ending in isolation is just a thing that happens (even if it is cool on its own). A good ending does something with what happened before. If you’re retrofitting an excuse for an ending, mixed with an idea of a start, then the journey isn’t a journey so much as an excuse. Let your story tell itself. Don’t be like the literary version of the sharpshooter fallacy. in summary, the best thing to do is start with your scenario and see how it unfolds. Whenever your mind goes “aha, now I can make this fit my preconceived ending” just push it out of your head. Let the story unfold and end where it does.
Every time I write a story I question if I can actually do it. I'll get an idea for the beginning and just go from there. It's a little bit of a thrill to write without knowing the story. And sometimes I have an idea for the ending, and know idea how to get there or if the two ends will ever meat up. The bottom line is you just have to go for it. It sounds like you might be trying to write an outline first and go from there, but maybe it won't work to work that way for this story. I found trying to plan and outline a story is much harder than just writing it. So, if you've got these two pieces and feel good about them. Maybe jump into the world of pantsing with this story.
I think that good idea could be to create some checkpoints beforehand. Thanks to checkpoints you don't have only the beginning and the end, but many smaller goals between them and it is easier to reach the checkpoint than be only looking at the end without knowing how to get there. The problem with the London and Tokyo can be easier when you know that your first checkpoint is Paris. Getting to Paris is much easier than getting to Tokyo, and so on... until you reach the destination.
I remember listening to an interview with David Chase who created the Sopranos and many other things. He said he only had outlines, very little detail when creating a season of episodes. I'm paraphrasing, but he said he would take a character and say they are going to get to certain point. And he would only fill in a few major details that would lead them to that point. Almost a timeline if you will. I found that I needed to write out a very rough outline, meaning one liners, beginning of the story to the end. It was a way to organize my thoughts. Then I was able to go back and start filling in. Again, that is what worked for me. But this could be very different for somebody else. It makes me think a little bit of the novel/movie Disclosure with strong characters and a lot of office wrangling.
