August Theme: The Creative Life
Big Question: How do we build a creative life that works for us?
Week 3: The Messy Middle
On Tuesday, I shared Reading Notes: The Cemetery of Untold Stories, which includes my initial reflections on the novel we read this week with our book club, along with some questions that kept resurfacing as I continued to read it. The post also includes some of my favorite quotes and passages from the first half of the book, and a list of discussion questions and writing prompts I wanted our book club to mull over as we finished the last half of the book.
Quick note: If you haven’t finished, or even started, the book yet, that’s okay! There’s still time to join the Buddy Read in Storygraph. You can also join our discussions on the book in post comments and the chat at any time.
So, today’s post will include my final thoughts on this week’s book club pick, as well as a collection of books that we should all add to our TBR piles for navigating ‘the messy middle,’ our focus of the week, which is part of the broader discussion we’re having about The Creative Life in August. Please, be sure to let me know of any additional books you’d add to the collection that follows, along with your thoughts on The Cemetery of Untold Stories in the comments or chat.
💭Final Reflections on The Cemetery of Untold Stories
Overall, I thought The Cemetery of Untold Stories by Julia Alvarez was an excellent selection for us to read this week, as it focused on ‘the messy middle’ of creative projects and stories, as well as ‘the messy middle’ of a creative life.
In this novel, stories that needed to live on, to be told, refused to remain buried. They also jumped across timelines and borders and narrators, literally and metaphorically, taking on lives of their own.
Essentially, this novel not only explored the weight of a writer’s unfinished work, but how that work can and usually does take on a life of its own that will outlast them and their original intentions for it, which is often completely out of a writer’s hands. It offers profound reminders of the power of storytelling and how stories form who we are, who we connect with, where we come from, what’s important to us, and where we’re going, even long after we leave the creative and physical world. Stories, in other words, always have a life of their own, whether we like it or not.
Ultimately, this novel beautifully highlights both the power and the striking limitations of a storyteller. It reminds us that the stories of our lives and the ones we write at our desks are never truly finished, even at the end of our lives or when we want to be finished with them. So, instead of fearing the unfinished work we leave behind, we must realize that our discarded pages and narrations still hold vital creative energy that is capable of outliving us.
💬Favorite Quotes and Passages from the Last Half of the Book
“People do this all the time with art, she says to Alma. At galleries, museums, you sometimes see someone unable to tear her gaze away from a certain face or scene depicted on the canvas, framed, hung on the wall. A Diego Rivera mural will make a jaw drop in awe at all the anonymous hands that make the world run. A Van Gogh will bring back the field of sunflowers outside a childhood home.” (p.122)
“What is her story? I wonder. Not the stories she has told me— medical school, the war, ambulance driving, but the story we keep to ourselves or even from ourselves about who we are and what we love and whether our lives reflect that.” (p.142)
“Infected by the American taste for brand-new, as if stories have an expiration date.” (p.162)
“If you listen harder, beneath the hullabaloo of traffic and the noisy barrio, you’ll hear them, the diaspora of drafted characters returning to the ashes of their rough drafts.” (p.164)
“The problem, she explains, is that many people don’t think they have a story. So, they tell you some canned telenovela plot or some imported Disney nonsense they believe you want to hear.” (p. 166)
“ As her own abilities waned and the stock market of her popularity plummeted, Alma began to lose faith in this chameleonlike quality, part of her disenchantment with the craft. But it had become a habit, being several people at once.” (p.191)
“Alma had no idea until she shut up that the earth itself was storying.” (p.204)
“But no matter. Who would want to go back to narrative form? Back into the living stream to be reborn in distortion in the minds of readers? A few linger, the clingers, the aggrieved, holding on to that hope. The ones with scores to settle or burdens to release. Not a fate to be desired, shackled again, contained and restrained in chapter and verse. And how long does it last anyhow? Eventually, storied and unstoried join in mystery. Nothing holds anyone together but imagination.” (p.237)
📚 Your TBR Pile for Navigating ‘The Messy Middle’
When the trajectory of your creative life or project stalls, turning to the pages of books with characters or guides who have survived a similar experience can give you the blueprint you need to keep going, or at least make you feel a little less alone and delusional, or like you should have it all figured out.
What follows is a collection of books you’ll want to add to your TBR, divided into three parts, that cover the chaos and ‘messy middle’ of a writer’s lifestyle, the messy trenches of an active draft, as well as a few essential non-fiction companions that can help you navigate your messy middles whenever and however they arise.
🧑🎨Part 1: The Messy Middle of the Creative Life
These novels explore the broad, lifetime arc of being an artist. They navigate domestic interruptions, aging, public identity, and the long years between successes.
Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff
🌪️The Messy Middle Focus: This novel tracks the decades-long creative trajectory of a successful playwright and peels back the glamorous surface to show the exhausting, collaborative ‘middle years’ of building a career.
💡The Takeaway: It highlights how marriage, compromises, and hidden internal motivations directly feed, and sometimes threaten, the creative ecosystem over a lifetime.
Less by Andrew Sean Greer
🌪️The Messy Middle Focus: A minor novelist facing a mid-career crisis flees his life to travel the world rather than face his ex-boyfriend’s wedding and his publisher rejecting his latest messy manuscript draft.
💡The Takeaway: A hilarious yet deeply moving exploration of the ‘middling’ creative life, showing that aging, career stagnation, and creative reinvention are all part of the creative journey.
Yellowface by R.F. Kuang
🌪️The Messy Middle Focus: After witnessing her literary rival’s freak accidental death, a struggling writer steals her friend’s unfinished, messy manuscript, edits it, and publishes it as her own.
💡The Takeaway: It shines a harsh, satirical spotlight on the pressures of the modern publishing industry and the toxic obsession with validation that can poison a writer’s authentic voice.
Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon
🌪️The Messy Middle Focus: Grady Tripp is trapped in a 2,000-page manuscript he cannot finish. His personal life is collapsing, and he relies on drugs to escape his paralyzing inability to make editing choices and suffers from ‘the midnight disease,’ an emotional insomnia and romantic addiction to the state of writing itself. Finishing the manuscript for him also means losing the world he lives in.
💡The Takeaway: Completing a creative project often requires the discipline to pare down, kill your darlings, and accept that an imperfect or seemingly incomplete project beats endless indecision. A creative project can easily become a hiding place to escape real life, but true creative progress often requires letting go of an endless, unmanageable draft, even if it takes a chaotic disaster to finally force a fresh start.
Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill
🌪️The Messy Middle Focus: Written in fragmented prose, this novel captures a writer whose creative ambitions get completely derailed and fractured by the daily friction of domestic life, caretaking, and a stalling marriage.
💡The Takeaway: It brilliantly articulates the internal grief of losing your creative focus to domestic caretaking, and the messy process of reclaiming your identity as an artist.
Little Known Facts by Christine Sneed
🌪️The Messy Middle Focus: Explores the complicated lives of an acclaimed Hollywood star’s adult children as they flounder in a quarter-life crisis, struggling to forge their own artistic and professional identities.
💡The Takeaway: It explores the unique creative paralysis that happens when you are surrounded by immense public success, forcing you to find the courage to build your own flawed, authentic path from scratch.
Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner
🌪️The Messy Middle Focus: Adam Gordon fakes his poetic research milestones while high on tranquilizers. He is paralyzed by imposter syndrome, fearing his art is just a shallow, fraudulent performance.
💡The Takeaway: Creative reinvention and expression require stripping away the performance of being an artist and tapping into the real world around you. You must stop hiding behind protective irony (and drugs) and engage genuinely with the raw realities of life.
Biography of X by Catherine Lacey
🌪️The Messy Middle Focus: Following the death of an iconoclastic artist known only as ‘X,’ her grieving wife sets out to write X’s definitive biography, getting completely lost in a chaotic labyrinth of secret identities and calculated lies.
💡The Takeaway: A fierce, dark exploration of the toxic myth of the ‘artistic genius’ and how the messy middle of an artist’s life is often built on the more subversive exploitation of the people who love them most.
📄Part 2: Manuscripts in “The Messy Middle’
These novels zoom in directly on the literal page-by-page creation of a manuscript, featuring protagonists caught in the terrifying structural or psychological gridlock of an active draft.
The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz
📑The Messy Middle Focus: A washed-up fiction professor is completely stalled in his career, trapped in the agonizing middle of obscurity with zero ideas, until he steals a brilliant plot outline from a deceased student.
📌The Takeaway: It perfectly captures the desperation of creative drought and the psychological panic that sets in when a writer feels their internal creative well has completely run dry.
Misery by Stephen King
📑The Messy Middle Focus: A famous novelist is held captive by his ‘number one fan.’ When she discovers he killed off her favorite character in his latest book, she forces him to burn the manuscript and write a brand-new sequel from scratch under strict, violent duress.
📌The Takeaway: The ultimate, extreme allegory for drafting a book under high stakes, capturing the exhausting daily toll of text generation and how high pressure forces a writer to find the technical skill to pull a story together when the magic is completely gone. And also captures an author’s worst nightmare.
Bunny by Mona Awad
📑The Messy Middle Focus: An elite, hyper-competitive MFA creative writing program serves as the backdrop for Samantha, a scholarship student who is completely stuck on her thesis draft. Paralyzed by self-doubt, she gets pulled into her classmates’ strangely cultish, elite clique.
📌The Takeaway: A dark, satirical masterpiece about how high-brow academic critique, creative isolation, and comparison can literally distort a writer’s sanity, showing the terrifying extremes of trying to fit your authentic voice into a rigid mold.
The Rumor by Elin Hilderbrand
📑The Messy Middle Focus: A celebrated novelist faces an absolute nightmare: she has spent her entire publisher’s advance, her deadline is weeks away, and she is completely blocked. Desperate, she starts adapting her best friend’s real-life scandalous gossip into a secret manuscript.
📌The Takeaway: A brutally honest look at the sheer desperation of a creative drought and the ethical lines writers cross when trying to mine their real-world relationships for raw material.
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
📑The Messy Middle Focus: The narrative plunges into a literal and intellectual labyrinth. The protagonist wanders through a secret, trap-rigged library while sorting through dense theological heresy, dense historical treatises, and contradictory clues that muddy a murder investigation.
📌The Takeaway: Ideological obsession can make people dangerous, as seen when the forbidden manuscript, Aristotle’s lost work on comedy, is feared by the establishment because its humor dismantles fear, and without fear, strict institutional power crumbles.
Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr
📑The Messy Middle Focus: The story fragments into five disparate lives across three centuries: a girl and a boy on opposite sides of the 1453 Siege of Constantinople, a modern-day eco-terrorist, an elderly veteran, and a child on a futuristic spaceship. The reader must navigate constant timeline shifts to see how their struggles interconnect.
📌The Takeaway: Literature is an unbroken thread of human survival. The ancient manuscript endures through centuries of chaos, war, and technology because the shared human need for hope and escape never changes.
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
📑The Messy Middle Focus: The book physically degrades into a structural nightmare. Pages feature text written in spirals, upside down, or trapped in tiny squares, buried under fictional academic footnotes, competing narrators, and contradictory descriptions of a shape-shifting house.
📌The Takeaway: Obsession breeds madness. The deeper the characters (and reader) dig into the manuscript to find objective truth, the more they lose their grip on reality, proving that the real monster is the dark abyss of human grief.
📓Part 3: The Non-Fiction Companions for Writers in ‘The Messy Middle’
These practical books and guides offer psychological and tactical strategies to get your pen moving again whenever you find yourself in ‘the messy middle.’
Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life by Dani Shapiro
✍️The Messy Middle Focus: A beautifully intimate guide addressing the daily internal noise, ambient anxiety, and emotional vulnerability that hits mid-career.
🔖The Takeaway: Reminds writers that the urge to abandon a project is a completely normal milestone of the editing process, offering a reassuring roadmap for maintaining an ongoing artistic practice amidst life’s inevitable distractions.
The Courage to Write: How Writers Face and Overcome Their Fears by Ralph Keyes
✍️The Messy Middle Focus: This psychological study dissects the intense, invisible anxieties that paralyze a writer, specifically the fear of exposure, judgment, and failing to meet your own expectations once a draft gets complex.
🔖The Takeaway: Keyes gathers wisdom from hundreds of iconic authors to prove that confidence is not a prerequisite for writing. Instead, true creative resilience means learning to create with your fear sitting right next to you.
Save the Cat! Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody
✍️The Messy Middle Focus: This guide addresses the common structural pitfall where a manuscript completely stalls out between the 25% and 75% marks. It specifically maps out the exact series of narrative beats required to keep tension rising when characters have left the beginning behind but aren’t ready for the finale.
🔖The Takeaway: Writers must break the center of the book into distinct, bite-sized chronological milestones like the ‘Bad Guys Close In’ and the ‘All Is Lost’ beats. By mapping these specific guideposts, you give your characters concrete hurdles that naturally prevent them from aimlessly wandering around.
Write Your Novel from the Middle by James Scott Bell
✍️The Messy Middle Focus: This book targets structural collapse and the loss of narrative direction that happens around the midpoint. It addresses the exact moment when the initial premise loses steam, and the climax is still too far away to provide momentum.
🔖The Takeaway: You must anchor your story with a central ‘mirror moment’ where the protagonist forces themselves to look at who they are. This realization shifts the character from reacting to the plot to actively driving the narrative toward the conclusion.
The Plot Whisperer by Martha Alderson
✍️The Messy Middle Focus: This book focuses deeply on the psychological and mechanical exhausting phase the author calls the ‘Universal Story Middle.’ She targets the exact point where subplots tangle up, stakes lose their urgency, and the writer becomes overwhelmed by the sheer volume of narrative choices.
🔖The Takeaway: You should divide your middle into a ‘Light Middle’ of initial struggle and a ‘Dark Middle’ of intense personal crisis. Forcing your character through this deliberate downward emotional trajectory ensures your subplots remain directly tied to the primary journey.
Refuse to Be Done by Matt Bell
✍️The Messy Middle Focus: This guide focuses on the severe loss of momentum that occurs when transitioning from a rough first draft into the swampy terrain of subsequent revisions. It addresses the overwhelming anxiety of looking at a chaotic center and not knowing which thread to pull first.
🔖The Takeaway: Writers should stop trying to fix every structural and stylistic issue simultaneously. Instead, you should use highly specific, execution-focused drafting phases, or passes, to systematically build out the book’s center one layer at a time.
Draft No. 4 by John McPhee
✍️The Messy Middle Focus: This collection of essays tackles the profound confusion that arises from complex structural layouts, tangled timelines, and massive information management mid-manuscript. It speaks directly to the phase where a project feels too big and disorganized to control.
🔖The Takeaway: Managing a dense narrative requires physical, structural diagrams and precise logical outlines to map out your story’s architecture. By visualizing the shape of your data, you can confidently guide the reader through the most complicated parts of your timeline.
Story Genius by Lisa Cron
✍️The Messy Middle Focus: This book tackles middles that sag because they are driven entirely by external, episodic events rather than internal necessity. The author diagnoses the middle as a failure of cause-and-effect, where things are simply happening ‘and then’ instead of building organically.
🔖The Takeaway: A successful middle must be built from the inside out by anchoring every single plot point to the protagonist’s internal evolution. By enforcing a strict cause-and-effect trajectory, each scene becomes the inevitable emotional consequence of the scene that came right before it.
Join Our Book Club Discussions
What are your thoughts on The Cemetery of Untold Stories by Julia Alvarez?
Check out the discussion questions and or drafting and dialoging prompts in Tuesday’s post, Reading Notes: The Cemetery of Untold Stories, to get your wheels rolling if you want. Then join our Buddy Read on Storygraph at any time this month to discuss this book with us. We’re starting a new book next week, but discussions for this August book club pick will still be up when you want to join them in the future.
📙Our Next Book Club Read
For week four, which starts tomorrow, the Daily Drafts & Dialogues Book Club is reading our Literary Dive Pick: Possession by A.S. Byatt, a Booker Prize-winning masterclass following two modern scholars who unearth a secret, forbidden romance between two famous Victorian poets through hidden letters.
As always, you can read at your own pace throughout the month, but here’s what you’ll want to know if you plan to follow The Weekly Buddy Read Schedule for Tuesday Reading Notes and Check-Ins:
Daily Target: Days 22-28 of August (approx. 70-80 pages/day) to finish in one week.
Tuesday Check-In Post: August 25, 2026: We close the month by looking at artistic obsession and research in this check-in post. We will explore the fine line between celebrating an artist’s work and completely losing oneself in their historical footprint, examining how the past continually reshapes the modern creator.
ICYMI: See the Complete August Book Club Pick Lineup with Customizable Reading Schedules
Whether you join a chat, one of our Buddy Reads in Storygraph, or lay it all out in the comments, I look forward to hearing more about your thoughts on our book club picks this month as we continue to discuss The Creative Life!
Please remember to like and share this post with your network so other readers can join us too!
✨📚✨Thank you! 🫶
Continue Exploring August’s Theme, The Creative Life
This Week: The Messy Middle
Writing Prompts for Navigating ‘The Messy Middle’
Is doubt a normal part of the creative process or a sign something isn’t working?
Reading Notes: The Cemetery of Untold Stories
What I Do When I’m in ‘The Messy Middle’
A Writer’s Guide to Surviving Creative Doubt and ‘The Messy Middle’
Popular Posts from Week 2: Creative Habits
Immersive Storytelling Mode and the ArXiv
Reading Notes: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
The Habits That Help Me and My Creative Life Most
Striking the Right Balance with Quantifiable Creative Habits
Popular Posts from Week 1: Making Space
A Day Alive in the Lakeside Library
How to Make Space and Time for Your Creative Life
The Creative Life as Play and Work
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