My 8k word short story collapsed at chapter 4 and I froze for 3 weeks

Back in January I started a short story about a night shift at a motel and got 8,000 words in before I realized chapter 4 made no sense at all. The whole middle part just repeated the same fight between the two main characters three different times and I only noticed when I read it out loud in my kitchen. I closed the doc on February 9th and have not touched it since, mostly because I cannot figure out if I should cut the chapter or rewrite the whole back half. Do you folks usually just power through the broken part or do you start over from the outline? I would love to hear what actually worked for you instead of the usual advice.

1 comments

Log in to join the discussion

Log In

1 Comment

sarahc6116d ago

The part about reading it out loud in your kitchen and only then noticing the repeated fight is the real clue here. If the same argument shows up three times, that usually means your brain was trying to work out one scene and kept circling back to it, which means the fix might be smaller than it feels. Try cutting chapters 4 and 5 down to just the one version that actually lands, then read what comes after and see if chapter 6 still makes sense. You might find the back half isn't broken, it just has a bad seam you can stitch, and that's way less scary than starting from the outline again. Three weeks of freezing usually means the answer is "cut" not "rewrite everything," because if it was really broken you wouldn't still be thinking about the motel at all.

2