Well, you’ve messed up. Now what?

This week I was working on the first draft of my current WIP. 18,000 words in, and I load up the next bit of the outline so I can keep on working on the story … and it’s the beginning of Act 3.

Wait, what? It’s nowhere near time for that! Where’s the rest? Did I skip half the outline? What the heck?

No … no, on further inspection, I just didn’t create much for the middle of the story. I built the characters, the inciting incident, some buildup, and then the exciting finale. Yep. Not much middle there.

Does that make me a bad writer?

Hah. No. This happens to everybody.
When I first started, this kind of setback would have made me feel like abandoning the project, and probably abandoning writing altogether. I mean, I didn’t create a Mark Twain level manuscript on the first draft, why am I even trying? Obviously if this was something I could do, it would just happen on the first try, right? Right?

No, that’s not how building stories works.
Your outline is an idea of what you want to write. It’s full of things you haven’t thought of yet, ideas you haven’t really investigated fully, dumb decisions your characters make because you want them to, not because it’s smart for them, blind plot points that don’t go anywhere, dumb villains, and every other warcrime we writers can commit against good stories. We all do it. All early work, to some extent, is bad.

That doesn’t mean you are bad. Or that your work is doomed to be bad.

So, when this happens, you pick up the tiny pieces of your ego, put them in a box for later reassembly, and you buckle down and get to work. Because, dammit, you are a writer, you know what to do, and you can fix it.

So go fix it.

Will I go back to the outline and brainstorm and have ideas and test theories and think about things and break and remake my story over and over and over again until it works? You betcha. That’s all I’m going to do until I fix it.

Will I lose some or all of my 18k hard written words? Yes. That’ll sting.

But that’s OK. Because what gets cut, lost, and destroyed deserves to die because it’s bad storytelling. The strong story beats will survive, and the whole work will be better for it.
And in the end, it will be a good story (at the very least not a bad one) because I’m a good writer and I can fix it. So when this happens to you, say this, out loud, to your reflection in the mirror:

“I’m a good writer and I know how to fix it.”

And then go fix it. You can do it.