Make Sense of Your Messy Middle With the Most Underrated Story Element

You don’t need more filler. You need better progressive complications.

Your inciting incident hooks your readers and promises them a story they’ll love.

And then comes the middle.

The messy middle. The quiet doldrums of your story, where plot momentum goes to die.

Where your characters wander, your conflict blurs, and you start to wonder if any of it is working.

So what do you do? Add some “stuff that happens” and hope it holds your readers’ interest? Toss in a random subplot? Describe your character’s breakfast in extreme detail?

Nope. This is the space of the progressive complications.

And in this episode, I’m showing you exactly how to revise them.

Because the middle of your story isn’t filler or unnecessary fluff. It’s 60% of the story, and it has an essential job to do.

• What progressive complications really are (and what they’re not)
• How they build momentum and escalate conflict
• The 8 qualities I’m looking for when I edit progressive complications
• How to know if your scenes are working—or just taking up space
• And more!

And to make it even easier, I’ve created a cheat sheet to help you revise your progressive complications. Print it out, keep it handy, and use it every time you edit a scene.

If you’ve ever gotten stuck in the middle of your manuscript wondering how to move forward—this episode is for you.

Let’s take your messy middle and make it unputdownable.

Links mentioned in the episode:

• Get the Inciting Incident Revision Cheat Sheet: alicesudlow.com/87
• Work with me: alicesudlow.com/contact
• Ep. 42: The 6 Essential Elements of Every Novel, Act, and Scene
• A clip from S1E4 of Younger

Want my support in your revision?

In Story Clarity, we’ll work one-on-one to sharpen your story’s structure and craft a revision plan that works. If you’re ready for thoughtful, personalized feedback from an editor who gets what you’re trying to do, I’d love to hear what you’re working on.

Get started by telling me about your story here.

Transcript

0:49

You open your story with an amazing inciting incident, you hook your reader's attention right away, promising them a brilliant tale. They're going to love you. Send your protagonist on a journey in pursuit of a goal. You kick off the first act with explosive, propulsive, unputdownable energy, and then you reach the middle. The messy middle, the quiet doldrums of your story. Where plot momentum goes to die somehow. You've got to get your protagonist and your readers from the exciting promise of the inciting incident at the beginning to the satisfying payoff of the climax at the end. And you've got to fill enough pages to stretch each scene out to scene length and the book out to book length. So what do you do? Throw a bunch of stuff in for your characters to do and hope that it somehow works and keeps your readers entertained or fluff out your sentences with extra words describing everything your characters encounter in obsessive detail. Nope. This is the space of the progressive complications. Not irrelevant stuff. Not distracting fluff, but unmissable, unskipable, unputdownable rising conflict that raises the stakes, prepares the protagonist for the climax and compels your reader to keep turning pages. In this episode, we'll demystify the messy middle so you can make your progressive complications some of the best parts of your story. Welcome to your next draft. Today we're continuing our deep dive into my favorite story structure framework, the six elements of story. We're putting the second element progressive complications under the microscope to see what they are and what makes them work. Last month we studied the inciting incidents in obsessive detail, and I think that was possibly one of my most popular episodes ever in the history of the podcast. So I'm pretty sure you're going to love what I have to share with you here. It turns out though, that I have a lot to say about progressive complications. Who would've thunk? So I'm splitting this episode into two parts. In this installment, I'm going to share the way I define progressive complications, where in a story the progressive complications appear. And what I'm watching for as an editor when I evaluate progressive complications, and in the next installment I'll share the common traps that I see writers fall into when they're writing and revising their progressive complications. You don't need to have listened to the inciting incident episode in order to follow everything that I'm going to talk about here. But I am going to assume you're at least a little bit aware of the six elements of story framework. If that's totally new to you, I recommend starting with my episode, the six essential elements of every novel act and scene, which I'll link in the show notes. I've also put together a free cheat sheet with everything that I'll cover in this episode. You can print it out and keep it at hand, easy to reference as you edit. Go to alice sud though.com/ 87 into your email there and I'll send it straight to you. Alright, we've got a lot to cover, so let's dive right in. Let's start with the definition. Here's how I define the progressive complications. A series of complications happen that escalate the conflict. These events might make things better or worse, but they certainly make things more complicated. What does that mean? Well, the inciting incident sets your protagonist on a path in pursuit of a goal, but they can't achieve their goal immediately. If it were that simple, they'd have it already so they embark on a course of action that should take them towards their goal. at least based on their existing worldview. That's everything they know and understand and believe about the world right now. Based on all of that, they think that this path will take them towards their goal and along the way they encounter challenges, things that move them closer to their goal or throw up obstacles in their way. Those are the progressive complications. Okay. Basically, they're all the things that challenge your protagonist and raise the stakes on their way to achieving their goal. They culminate in the turning point, which is a special progressive complication with several additional jobs to do. It's the moment when the protagonist's strategy and tactics fail to such a degree that it breaks their existing worldview. The protagonist irrevocably changes, and so the story irrevocably changes. I'll put the turning point under a microscope in another episode, but for now, it's enough to know that it's technically also a progressive complication, and the job of the progressive complications is to carry the reader to the global crisis of the story where the stakes are the highest they've been so far. Where in the story are the progressive complications? As you can probably guess from that definition alone, the progressive complications span a lot of the story. 60% or more of a seen act or global story can be spent in the progressive complications. If I had to mark percentages, I'd estimate that they tend to start somewhere around the 15% mark and wrap up somewhere around the 70% mark. Those are really loose ballpark numbers though. The point is they're the middle of the story and they're the bulk of the story. in short, the progressive complications matter. This, by the way, is why I call my favorite story structure framework, the six elements of story. If you're an avid student of craft books, you're probably familiar with Sean Coin's Story Grid. I'm a story grid certified editor, and story grid is where I was introduced to this framework. But the framework as story grid describes it, It's called the Five Commandments of Storytelling. The five commandments are, one, the inciting incident, two, the Turning Point, progressive complication. Three, the crisis, four, the climax, and five the resolution. In essence, the five Commandments, skip over the progressive complications and jump straight to the turning point. On the one hand, I do sort of get why. As you'll see, when we put the turning point under the microscope, there are very specific things that are set up in the inciting incident. Irreversibly challenged in the turning point and then paid off in the climax. The turning point does have an essential job to do and you can't really effectively revise your progressive complications until you know what that turning point is doing. But. The progressive complications are 60% of the story. I felt adamantly that the progressive complications also have an essential job to do because no one wants to buy a novel with the middle, two thirds sliced out of it. Plus, this is the messy middle of the story, the part where writers tend to feel lost, adrift in storytelling, doldrums, unsure what needs to happen between the setup of the inciting incident and the payoff of the climax. So I kept the progressive complications in the framework. I renamed it the six elements of story to recognize their significance. I set out to figure out what exactly the progressive complications must accomplish, and this is what I found. There are seven qualities that I'm watching for throughout the progressive complications. One, the progressive complications escalate. Each complication raises the stakes higher than the last. They don't repeat the same conflict at the same intensity, with the same stakes. They raise it all. Here's an example from season one, episode four of the TV show, younger. Our protagonist, Liza and her friend Kelsey go to a bar to celebrate Kelsey landing a major project at work. Kelsey asks Liza to keep her from drinking too much because tomorrow she has the first meeting with the client to kick off the project and she wants to be sharp and ready in the morning. So Liza's goal is to mitigate Kelsey's drinking without ruining Kelsey's celebration. Progressive complication. Kelsey has one drink. Liza encourages her to stop there and Kelsey agrees. Progressive complication. Kelsey's boyfriend Thad shows up and orders a round of shots. Liza reluctantly agrees that one round is fine and they drink progressive complication. Thad orders six more rounds of shots despite Liza's protests, Kelsey Sides with Thad rather than Liza, and drinks every round progressive complication. It's now after midnight and Kelsey is very drunk. She decides they should all go to Liza's boyfriend's tattoo parlor and get tattoos. Thad decides to go home and leaves Kelsey in Liza's care. Liza tries to get Kelsey to go home, but Kelsey has already called the Uber to the tattoo parlor. Progressive complication while they're in the Uber and before Liza can stop her. Kelsey drunk texts her new client that he's hot, progressive complication. when they get to the tattoo parlor, it's closed. Liza's boyfriend, Josh lives upstairs, so before Liza can stop her, Kelsey picks up a rock and throws it at his window, breaking the window. Progressive complication. Josh wakes up and comes to the door with another woman in a nightgown. Do you see how the complications escalate from Kelsey? Agreeing to stop drinking, to wasted Kelsey throwing a rock through Josh's window. With each new complication, the stakes become higher and Liza's ability to achieve her goal protecting Kelsey from the consequences of drinking too much, becomes more important and more difficult. That's the progressive part of progressive complications. They are steadily increasing in intensity, escalating inexorably until they culminate in the turning point. Two. The progressive complications can be positive or negative, never neutral. When progressive complications are positive, they move the protagonist closer to their goal. They're a happy opportunity. A piece of good news, a helping hand Kelsey agreeing to stop after one drink. That's positive. When they're negative, they move the protagonist farther away from their goal. They're an unforeseen obstacle, a failure of a plan, a new enemy, Thad showing up and pressuring Kelsey to drink many rounds of shots that's negative. Both positive and negative developments can be progressive complications. Complication doesn't mean bad. Positive things can also complicate the situation. The only thing they can't be is neutral. Three. Progressive complications can be active or revelatory. Active means there's something that happens. An external event revelatory means that they're the reveal of new information, something that the protagonist didn't know, or perhaps the reader didn't know. All those times that Kelsey dismisses liza's protests and drinks the shots, fad orders. Those are actions. The discovery that Liza's boyfriend has another woman staying over that's revelatory. Don't get too hung up here. You don't need to evaluate every single progressive complication in your story to note whether they're active or revelatory, but if you find that your progressive complications aren't escalating or feel repetitive, especially on the level of the global story, it might be because you have a long stretch of only active or only revelatory complications. Four, the progressive complications can be causal or coincidental. But tread carefully with coincidences. A causal progressive complication is the result of a character's action. Kelsey called Thad and told him about her work win. therefore, he came to join her at the bar. Therefore he bought her too many rounds of shots and therefore Kelsey kept drinking shots. This puts Liza in a tough position to either one, let Kelsey keep taking shots or two, force the celebration to stop. There's a clear cause and effect relationship that connects every event to the ones before and after it. A coincidental progressive complication is the result of random chance it's raining or it's sunny. You're driving to work and you get rear-ended. Kelsey throws a rock through Liza's boyfriend's window, and it just so happens that this is a night when he has another woman over. There's no cause and defect relationship connecting that to other events. It's simply the randomness of life that sometimes things happen that we're not expecting. Tread carefully with coincidences in your story. There are two principles to keep in mind here. First coincidences work best when they're negative rather than positive. Negative coincidences ring true. They reflect the random chaos that we experience every day. Positive coincidences feel like a Deus xm, a rescue from our problems. I have yet to read a novel where the climax is a character winning a million dollars in the lottery and that's solving all of their problems. I can think of several stories though, Where the inciting incident is the character winning a lottery with consequences that are undesirable and sometimes even deadly. Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, the Lottery by Shirley Jackson. The episode, luck of the Draw from the TV show Sliders Ends the movie. It could happen to you all begin with the random chance of winning a lottery And then they challenge their characters to navigate a lot of cause and effect base negative fallout from those coincidental wins. So be careful with positive coincidences, and especially avoid using them as a Deus X mock in a rescue for your characters. And second coincidences work best when they're used sparingly too many, and you'll destroy the reader's willing suspension of disbelief. So sprinkle in coincidences, sparingly, and look for the cause and effect trajectory connecting your progressive complications. It's especially helpful to watch for those cause and defect connections. On the level of the global story, I don't typically explicitly analyze the cause and defect chain on the scene level, but it can give you real insight into plot holes and logical gaps in the big picture story. Five. The progressive complications come from outside the protagonist or are a result of a choice the protagonist makes. The key here is. Progressive complications are not choices the character makes. They can be something that happens to the protagonist because of someone else's choices. They can be the result, the impact, the outcome of the choice that the protagonist makes, but they are not themselves. The choices the protagonist makes. Choices the protagonist makes are essential. They drive the plot and they give the protagonist agency. The protagonist will be making choices about how to respond to progressive complications constantly, but the progressive complications are not themselves. The protagonist choices. Back to our example scene with Liza and Kelsey. Remember, Liza is our protagonist and her goal is to mitigate Kelsey's drinking without ruining Kelsey's celebration. every time Liza tries to tell Kelsey and Thad to slow down, to stop drinking, to take it easy to go home. That's Liza's Choice, Liza's Action Liza's Agency. It's not a progressive complication. Every time Kelsey refuses, takes more shots, calls an Uber, throws a rock, those are all challenges coming from outside of Liza. their choices Kelsey makes and actions Kelsey takes, they are progressive complications. And Liza's task is to figure out how the heck to respond. Six. On the scene level, there are typically one to three progressive complications on the level of the global story. Every scene is a progressive complication. There's no one right number of progressive complications. You can have as many as you need at every level of story, and to some degree, anything can be a progressive complication. Get too granular in your analysis and you could read every line of dialogue back and forth between characters as its own individual progressive complication. I don't recommend looking that closely. You'll hit a point of diminishing returns in your analysis and you'll start to miss the forest for the trees. You could get lost in the slight pitch of new anger in Kelsey's voice as she tells Liza no for the fifth time and miss that. All that's happened for six pages is Kelsey drinking five shots. Your progressive complications aren't escalating. What you want to watch for are the major plot developments. Kelsey's boyfriend showing up, Kelsey calling an Uber Kelsey throwing a rock. There are typically one to three major plot developments like this in a scene. A long scene could have more, but as long as you have at least one, you're fine. Zoom all the way out to the big picture and every scene should be a progressive complication. If it doesn't escalate the conflict and move the story forward in some way, it hasn't earned its place in the story. Kelsey's big night of Drinking moves the larger episode plot forward in three ways. First, Kelsey will oversleep be very hungover and miss the meeting with the new client in the morning. Second, she's already made their relationship very unprofessional by drunk texting them that he's hot. And third, she's going to blame Liza for not doing what Kelsey asked and preventing her from drinking too much, which is to say it's Liza's fault that Kelsey's kicking things off so poorly with her new client. It's a scene full of progressive complications and it's one progressive complication in the larger episode. And now. The seventh quality I look for in the progressive complications, and the biggest reason that I separate them out from story grid's five commandments seven. On the scene level, the progressive complications reinforce the starting value on the global level. They move along the spectrum of the value. What are the progressive complications doing for 60% of the story? What unskipable irreplaceable role do they serve? That's not done by any other element of story. They are emphasizing the before side of the value shift. Remember, stories are about change. the inciting incident. Establishes that things are one way a before The turning point, crisis and climax, the value will shift and by the resolution will be in the after the new world order. The result of the change, the job of the progressive complications is to emphasize the, before. This looks a little different on the level of the scene versus the global story, so let's break them down. On the scene level, things start one way and end another way. Kelsey is out celebrating to going home. That's the end of a scene. By the way. Liza shoves her in another Uber and bodily forces her to end her night. The shift is binary. She's out and then she's going home. Liza is being patient with her and going along with her, and then Liza is fed up and done and taking control. All the progressive complications, the boyfriend, the shots, the tattoo idea, the Uber, the Rock, they all emphasize how out celebrating Kelsey is and how patient and going along Liza is. Their whole entire job is to make us really feel that before side of the value shift, the first half of a binary value. Zoom out to the big picture and look at the story as a whole, and it's a little bit different. The value shift in a novel isn't binary. It's a spectrum. Consider love versus hate. For example, that spectrum looks like this. hate master, love to hate to dislike, to indifference, to like to love. In an enemies to love's romance, the levers will begin way at the hate end of the spectrum, and by the end of the story, they'll move to love, but they won't spend 60% of the story sitting immovable at hate. The story won't spend all the progressive complications emphasizing, unchanging hatred, then flip magically to the opposite end of the spectrum and bring them all the way to love at the turning point. Of course not. That would be insufferably boring for most of the story. And then unbelievable and ridiculous at the end. So the job of the progressive complications, the Unskipable unmissable essential job, The reason you can't just cut 60% from the middle of every novel is to move the story along the spectrum of the value. The progressive complications might move the story forwards and backwards Along that spectrum, some scenes will bring the story closer to the positive end and others will push it to the negative end. think again of our enemies To lover's romance. In one scene, he might do something that builds her trust in him, despite her determination to hate him. On the scene level, they go from distrust to trust, from hatred to grudging, dislike. And then in another scene, he might betray that trust. Trust to distrust again, and from grudging dislike to even deeper hatred within the scene. The value shift is generally binary on the level of the global story. The value shifts along the entire spectrum, The role of the progressive complications is to reinforce the foresight of the value shift on the scene level and on the level of the global story to move the story through all the chaos and drama of the value spectrum before it reaches its final, after state, before our enemies to lovers reach their steady, secure love, and finally. Eight, the progressive complications are aligned with the stories genre. I've put this one last because if your progressive complications are doing their job well in terms of the value shift, then they're also passing this last test with flying colors because the progressive complications move the story along the spectrum of the value shift, this also means that the progressive complications are aligned with the story's genre. That's because the value at stake is defined by the genre, or the genre is defined by the value at stake, however you like to look at it. Either way, they're inextricably connected. That means that those enemies to levers probably won't suddenly discover a dead body somewhere in the middle of the progressive complications. A dead body points us to the life and death stakes of an action story or the justice and tyranny stakes of a crime story. If the enemies suddenly got distracted by an investigation, it would cease to be a romance story and become a crime story instead. Unless, of course, you are intentionally blending genres, and this is, say, an enemies to love's mafia story, that means the dead body is a progressive complication that's relevant to the crime plot. But in order to not lose the threat of the romance, you'll need to make it relevant to the love plot too. How does discovering the dead body impact how our lovers feel about each other? Does it force them to work together and they start to like each other a little bit more? Or do they suspect each other of the crime and their fragile alliance begins to erode? Remind yourself of the change at the heart of your story. Keep the value spectrum in mind and check for how each progressive complication moves the story along it. That way you'll ensure that every progressive complication is aligned with your story's genre and nothing feels outta the blue or irrelevant to your readers. So there you have it. The eight qualities that I'm looking for in effective progressive complications. Here they are again. The progressive complications one, escalate two are positive or negative, never neutral. Three can be active or revelatory. Four can be causal or coincidental, but tread carefully with coincidences. Five. Come from outside the protagonist or are the result of a choice the protagonist makes. Six typically include one to three progressive complications on the scene level and on the global level. Every scene is a progressive complication. Seven on the scene level reinforce the beginning value and on the global level, move along the spectrum of the value, and eight are aligned with the stories genre. So now you know what progressive complications are, how they function in a scene and in a global story, and what I'm looking for when I evaluate them. But there's another essential part of the conversation we haven't touched yet, What happens when they don't work? What does it look like when progressive complications fall flat? What traps do writers commonly fall into, and how do those traps affect your story and your readers? that's what I'll be covering in the next installment on progressive complications. I'll walk you through the five most common traps that I see in manuscripts, how they show up, what they do to the reader's experience, and how to fix them in revision. So if you've ever had a scene or a story feel slow, repetitive, scattered, or like it's almost working, but not quite, don't miss the next installment in this series coming four weeks from now. In the meantime, you can download a free progressive complication cheat sheet to keep all of this in front of you while you revise. Go to alice sudler.com/ 87, enter your email and I'll send it straight to your inbox. And if all of this feels overwhelmingly technical, like the calculus of storytelling, I get it. That's why I'm here. I study stories in granular detail and run this level of analysis in my head so that you can stay in your storytelling flow and think about these concepts only as much or as little as you like. Progressive complications are where so many writers get stuck, not because they don't know how to write them, but because this part of the story feels like a foggy, uncharted stretch between the big moments. It's easy to lose your sense of direction here if you'd like help, seeing what's working, what's missing, and how to revise your scenes so that every moment builds towards something powerful. I'd love to work with you. Go to Alice sudler.com/contact and fill out the form there to tell me about your story and I'll be in touch. Until next time, happy editing.