Where Progressive Complications Go WRONG (and How to Fix Them)

Are your readers bored? Disappointed? Confused? Here's what that tells you about your story's middle.

You’re stuck in the messy middle. Languishing in the doldrums of your story. The inciting incident is long past, the climax is so far ahead you can’t see it over the horizon, and you’re drifting, lost at sea.

What is actually supposed to happen here?

Where did your plot momentum go?

Why do your pages feel full of stuff, and yet nothing ever happens?

The answers to all those questions lie in your progressive complications. Specifically, something’s going wrong in your progressive complications.

In this episode, I’m digging even deeper into the progressive complications.

I’m sharing the seven most common traps I see, the impact they have on your story and your readers, and of course, how to fix them so you can make your story unputdownable from beginning to end.

You’ll learn:

• How to diagnose the problem in your story’s middle based on how your reader feels
• How to spot “fluff” that isn’t moving your story forward
• How coincidences work in stories—and what happens when they don’t work
• What happens when a story has no progressive complications at all
• And more!

And don’t miss the free cheat sheet that goes with this episode! Print it and keep it handy as you’re editing.

Here’s the thing: the middle of a story isn’t an inscrutable secret. This episode is your guide to spot the most common traps and free your story from them.

Links mentioned in the episode:

• Get the Progressive Complication Revision Cheat Sheet: alicesudlow.com/88 
• Work with me: alicesudlow.com/contact
• Ep. 87: Make Sense of Your Messy Middle With the Most Underrated Story Element

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

So you are stuck in the messy middle, languishing in the doldrums of your story. The inciting incident is long past, the climax is so far ahead, you can't see it over the horizon, and you're drifting lost at sea. What is actually supposed to happen here? Where did your plot momentum go? Why do your pages feel full of stuff and yet nothing happens? How did the story that inspired you so much at the start lose its way and become boring? How do you make this long stretch of middle matter? Here's the thing. The middle of a story isn't an inscrutable secret. Great middles are made of a series of progressive complications that compel your protagonist and your reader to keep going to the climax, which means that if your messy middle just refuses to come together. It's likely because you've fallen into some common progressive complication traps, the things that don't work to keep protagonists moving and readers reading. In this episode, I'm sharing the seven most common traps. I see the impacts they have on your story and your readers, and of course, how to fix them so you can make your story unputdownable from beginning to end. Let's spring you from the traps, shall we? Welcome to your next draft. In the last episode, I shared the way I define the progressive complications, where in the story the progressive complications appear, and what I'm watching for as an editor when I evaluate progressive complications, and today I'm covering seven common traps that writers often fall into when they're writing their progressive complications. The messy middle of your novel. If you haven't yet listened to the previous episode, I recommend you check it out. It's called Make Sense of Your Messy Middle, with the most underrated Story Element, and the link is in the show notes. And I've also put together a free cheat sheet with all the progressive complication insights from both episodes. You can print it out and keep it at hand, easy to reference as you edit. Go to alice sudler.com/eight eight. Enter your email there and I'll send it straight to you. Now we've got a lot to cover, so I'm going to get right to it. First, let's quickly recap the eight qualities that I'm looking for in progressive complications. 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 and we will explore that more in a moment. Five, they come from outside the protagonist or they are the result of a choice. The protagonist makes six. Stories 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, the progressive complications reinforce the beginning value, and on the global level, they move the story along the spectrum of the value. And eight, the progressive complications are aligned with the stories genre. Now you can absolutely use those eight qualities as a sort of checklist to evaluate your progressive complications, but there are a few common traps that I often see in manuscripts. Think of them as the symptoms that are present when some of those eight qualities are broken. I'm going to walk you through seven traps you can watch for the impact they have on the reader and the missing quality that will solve them, Here's the first one. the progressive complications are neutral. Neutral. Progressive complications are things that happen in the story that don't escalate the conflict in a positive or negative way. They don't move the protagonist closer to or further from their goal. They're not actually progressive complications at all. They're just stuff that happens. Fluff, story filler, the busy work of story events. If you cut them out of the story entirely, nothing would change. I have seen manuscripts filled with so much stuff, thousands of words, even tens of thousands of words where nothing actually happened. This slows the story down for the reader. It leaks tension from the story because of the lack of conflict. As far as the reader can tell, nothing seems to matter. It's all irrelevant information, and that is boring. Remember, in story, nothing is neutral. Figure out why the neutral thing matters to the story or cut it Now for the second trap, the progressive complications repeat the same conflict rather than escalating the conflict. This is a very common trap in the first episode on progressive complications. I used an example seen from the TV show younger. Liza and Kelsey are out celebrating Kelsey's new client. Kelsey charges Liza, our protagonist, with the responsibility of keeping Kelsey from getting wasted and sloppy, which would set her up for failure when she meets with the clients in the morning. Let's zoom in on the early part of the scene. First, Kelsey agrees to stop shrinking. Then Kelsey's boyfriend arrives and they take a round of shots. Then Kelsey's boyfriend orders six more rounds of shots. each of those six rounds of shots is the same progressive complication over and over and over. Individually, they don't add anything new or raise the stakes. They simply repeat the same challenge again and again. Kelsey's boyfriend ordering shots, Liza saying No, and Kelsey drinking the shots. Anyway, watch the scene and you'll see that all six rounds are smushed into one montage. For about 30 seconds, we watch Kelsey and her boyfriend throwing back an absurd number of shots. I don't even know how many, honestly, because it all becomes sort of a blur. And that's because the showrunners made the wise decision to collapse those many rounds of shots into one single progressive complication. The sheer volume of alcohol that Kelsey drinks as Liza is unable to stop her. Where writers go wrong is when they mistake each round of shots as a fresh progressive complication. After all, each time Kelsey's boyfriend orders another round. Liza objects and her objections are overruled. And every shot is making Kelsey more drunk and more difficult to manage. So it's escalating the scene, right? Technically yes, but only incrementally. And without presenting any fresh challenges to Liza. If you repeat progressive complications like this without actually escalating the story for the reader, this will slow the story down. It feels irritatingly repetitive, and it bores us. It's much more interesting to compress all the shots into a montage And move us forward to Kelsey throwing a rock through a window, which is a progressive complication that happens later in the scene. Another version of this trap is a long series of progressive complications that are all active or all revelatory. The protagonist learns groundbreaking information and then they learn more groundbreaking information, and then they learn yet more groundbreaking information. This too, can feel repetitive. Slow your story down and bore your reader. Now, the third trap, the progressive complications. Don't reinforce the starting value, but pull us off course to focus on different values This looks a little bit different on the scene level versus the global story, so let's break them both down. In the global story, this looks like throwing a dead body into an enemies to lover's romance, assuming that it's just a romance and not also a mafia story, or it might be more subtle than that, it might shift the focus to a different character relationship that doesn't impact the romance or to a different problem. That's not the goal of the protagonist is chasing. It might feel like opening up a new plot thread for just a scene or two and then never resolving it or using it to impact the main story. I watched a performance story this weekend where everything was really, really good. Loved the whole thing, but there were just a handful of scenes where I felt really bored. And when I sat back to think about those after I finished the movie, I realized that all of those scenes were about a romance subplot that had no impact whatsoever on the journey of the protagonist towards his goal, and honestly, I think the story would've been better if we just cut the girlfriend entirely. Usually this kind of diversion of focus from the core conflict of the story to other sorts of values, other kinds of events occurs because the writer isn't clear on their character's distinct internal arc. Because of that, the writer adds in a variety of complications that. Could matter or they could be a distraction from the main plot. And because the writer isn't clear on how and why they matter to the character's internal arc, those events feel oddly disconnected or off topic. Now that's it on the global level. Now let's look at the scene level. On the scene level, this looks like things happening, maybe even interesting things that aren't related to the protagonist skull within the scene, it's any details that aren't relevant to the conflict and the value shift of the scene. Here's the thing about readers. They're smart and they trust that you, the writer, will tell them only the things that matter and all of the things that matter. Therefore, if you've put something on the page, your readers will assume that it matters until proven otherwise, when this kind of scattershot collection of progressive complications happens. When your progressive complications emphasize a variety of values. It splinters the reader's focus. Now you're telling them to look in a lot of different directions, not just at one single thing, because they're looking in a lot of different directions. They won't get to experience one streamlined build of emotion and meaning over the course of the scene or the story, and that pulls the power from the emotional punch. At the end of the story, the readers will feel it, but with just a fraction of the impact that it could have. Now, it's also possible that you'll confuse your readers because you're sending their attention in several directions. But honestly, it'll take a while to confuse your readers because they're smart. They will track with you looking for all the connections and meaning in every scattershot detail that you share. And when they get to the end, they'll notice which threads haven't paid off, and they'll be disappointed. Me with this performance story, with this romance subplot that ended up not mattering. editor's note. I realized I'm not actually hating on this movie. I think it's a really good movie. So it's worth mentioning the title so you can see what my reference is. The movie is Grand Torino and the performance story is a guy who wants to be a race car driver, learning to drive race cars through a video game, and then trying to actually become a race car driver and prove that he can do it. The performance plot is excellent, And there's a little Roman subplot that I don't think added anything to the movie. The movie itself is very good and worth watching, and I think an interesting study in what it looks like when your progressive complications are not relevant to the plot of your story. Remember, the whole job of your progressive complications is to emphasize the value on the scene level, to reinforce the starting value and on the global level to move the story through the spectrum of values. So in your revision, watch really carefully to see whether you're emphasizing what you want the reader to focus on, or whether you're splintering the reader's attention and sending them off course. So that's that trap. Now, the next three traps are all about coincidences and the cause and effect trajectory of your story. I promised you we dig into it and here we go. Here's trap number four. The progressive complications are too coincidental. Now, I rarely see this trap on the scene level, but it does happen, especially on the global level. This occurs in two ways. One, that there are several coincidences happening very close together. Remember that progressive complications can be causal or coincidental, but too many coincidences will break the reader's suspension of disbelief as well as break down the goal-driven cause and effect trajectory of the story. The other trap here isn't the frequency of coincidences, but the believability of them. Even one coincidence that's too convenient will threaten the suspension of disbelief. What does too convenient mean? It can mean a couple of things. It might be a series of positive coincidences where the protagonist gets what they want and we start to feel that the story is going too easily for them. Or it might be just one event where the reader can tell that you, the author, really needed something to happen in a particular way you needed character A to be at location B. So conveniently, there they are, you needed to reveal a particular piece of information, and so character c blurts it out for no reason, just when the protagonist needs to hear it. So that's what I mean by too convenient, too many positive coincidences in a row, making life too easy for the protagonist or story developments that feel contrived, where you're inadvertently telegraphing to the reader that the reason something happened is just because you, the writer, really needed it to. All of these varieties of coincidence will erode the reader's suspension of disbelief. The story will no longer feel grounded in reality, but fantastical and unrealistic. not in a cool fantasy world building way, but in a, this story lost me kind of way. In addition, the two convenient coincidences will also make the reader feel as though they can see behind the curtain the cogs and gears the author is using to construct the story. It will no longer feel like story magic, but like the reader knows the magician's secrets and can spot their work behind the scenes. Now, don't let this turn you away from coincidental progressive complications altogether. Consider that in pride and Prejudice. Mr. Bingley's decision to rinse Netherfield is entirely a coincidence. So too is Wickham just happening to be among the malicious, stationed nearby. And when Elizabeth goes to visit Kimberly, it's a coincidence that Mr. Darcy happens to return that day and see her. Coincidences happen in life and in story, and they do effectively move the story forward. Just keep an eye out that you don't have so many coincidences that you threaten the reader's suspension of disbelief. And if you ever have the gut feeling that you're manipulating a story event for your convenience, because you just need something to happen. Check yourself and look for a way to move the chess pieces of your story with reasonable causality. If you feel like something is contrived, the reader will feel it too. So that was trap number four. Here's trap number five. Still on the theme of the coincidences. The majority of the progressive complications are not caused by the protagonist actions, and so the protagonist lacks agency. Again, this one is rare on the scene level, but it is a common trap on the global level. It occurs when the progressive complications are not caused by the actions the protagonist takes. Remember the protagonist choices and actions are not themselves progressive complications, but the results of those choices and actions can be progressive complications. when the protagonist takes action. We assume that the consequences of that action will be the next progressive complication. The next thing that the protagonist has to deal with. The trap here is when their actions don't impact the next progressive complication. Instead, the next progressive complication comes out of the blue, unrelated to the choices the protagonist has made. In all of these instances, the protagonist loses agency. We're not watching a strong protagonist make choices that have an impact on their life and the world around them, and then navigate the consequences. We're not following the protagonist as they drive the plot. Instead, we're watching a protagonist get blown about the story on the winds of chance or someone else's decision making. All of this risks the reader becoming disappointed by the story, disliking the protagonist, and getting bored. We like to see characters take bold and interesting action and then navigate the consequences. We find it annoying, frustrating, disappointing or boring when we watch characters without agency fall into and out of circumstances outside their control. So watch for how your protagonist's actions cause the next progressive complications and make sure that their choices are driving the story. Now, chapter number six, there's little or no causality connecting progressive complications. And so the story feels episodic Again, this is a trap I rarely see on the scene level in scenes, I find that writers are typically pretty consistent about creating strong chains of cause and effect. It is less common that we lose that chain of causality on the scene level, but this is a trap on the global level. In this trap, writers turn progressive complications into self-contained stories of their own. When this happens, each progressive complication feels like a big event that's disconnected from the larger goal and conclusively resolved within a few scenes. The impact on the reader is an episodic feel rather than one cohesive, singular story. It reads like a series of short stories without a clear and meaningful build towards an overarching plot. and there are types of storytelling where an episodic structure is desirable. Episodes of television are literally episodic. The Mandalorian is one show that stands out for me as being particularly, so each episode feels to me like one small story. They do build to a cohesive, overarching whole. But every episode is kind of like a little short story within it. It's a delightful viewing experience. Another type of storytelling that lends itself to an episodic structure is tabletop role-playing games. when you're playing an RPG, each section of storytelling has to fit within one gaming session. So just a few hours together, and there can be one-off encounters that are fun to play, but have limited plot significance. I've worked on some novels that have been translated from RPG campaigns, And those stories tend to need some refining to turn the episodic feel into one cohesive momentum driven story. Then there are novels like Anne of Green Gables that truly are designed to be somewhat episodic. Anne of Green Gables reads as a series of vignettes rather than one singular build of plot. The trick there though is that Anne of Green Gables is a primarily internal story rather than an external one. It's not a high stakes action plot. It's a slow, gentle, long-term story of character transformation where the internal genre takes the lead. Those stories can be very rewarding to read, but because the story arc is so internal and they're light on external action and plot, they are more challenging to write, and that episodic vignette approach does not work very well for highly external novels like the action genre. So default to creating clear, strong driving cause and effect connections between your progressive complications on both the scene and the global story level. Unless you have a really good reason to break that. And even then, if you go the vignette route, I, I'd say you'll still need strong internal causality, even if the external events are only loosely connected. So those are the main traps that stories fall into when they lean harder on coincidence than causality and lose their cause and effect trajectory. The final trap is not about coincidences, but something even simpler. Here it is. There are no. Progressive complications. All the challenges of coincidence and causality are almost always global issues. Usually on the scene level, we can pretty clearly see how one story beat causes the next one. By contrast, this trap an absence of progressive complications. This is almost always a scene issue. I have never yet encountered a writer who had no progressive complications in their global story, but I have encountered scenes with no progressive complications. This means that the scene moves straight from the inciting incidents to the turning point with no progressive complications in between. Or the first major thing that happens in the scene feels like both the inciting incident and the turning point It probably comes about one third of the way through the scene. So there are several pages of general scene setting before it happens. And once it happens, it feels like the action has just kicked off. The character's goal has just been incited, and in the same moment, the character is rushed straight into their crisis and climax. The several pages of scene setting before the inciting incident aren't inherently a problem. Sometimes the scene needs that time and space to really establish the before value, before the inciting incidents disrupt things. But when you combine that longer opening with a lack of progressive complications and one single event that's playing the role of both inciting incidents and turning points. It means that the scene structure, pacing, and purpose are wonky From the reader's perspective, the scene still moves the story forward, but there's potential left unrealized punches that it pulled emotional impact that it could have had but missed. So. Space things out. Figure out what the scene is really about and what the inciting incidents and turning point are, and then look for at least one progressive complication that can escalate the conflict in between them. and there you have it. The seven most common progressive complication traps that I see here they are again, one. The progressive complications are neutral. This slows the story down. Leaks tension because of the lack of conflict and bores the reader because they feel like they're wading through irrelevant information. Two, the progressive complications repeat the same conflict rather than escalating the conflict. This slows the story down. Feels irritatingly, repetitive, and bores the reader. Three, the progressive complications. Don't reinforce the starting value, but pull us off course to focus on different values. This splinters the reader's focus pulls power from the emotional punch of the ending and risks confusing or disappointing readers when they noticed that details were included, that didn't matter, or plot threads were opened without payoff four. If the progressive complications are too coincidental, this is usually a global story level issue and it erodes the reader's suspension of disbelief. In addition, if the coincidences feel contrived, the reader will feel like they're seeing the story machinery at work rather than getting lost in the magic. Five. The majority of the progressive complications are not caused by the protagonist's actions, and so the protagonist lacks agency. This is usually a global story level issue, and it disappoints the reader, makes them dislike the protagonist and bores them. Six. There's little or no causality, connecting progressive complications, and so the story feels episodic. This is a global story level issue, And it makes the reader feel like they're reading a series of short stories, watching a season of TV show or following an RPG campaign rather than experiencing the cohesive, overarching plot of a novel. And seven, there are no progressive complications. This is a scene level issue, and while the scene may move the story forward, it leaves potential impact and meaning unrealized. So now that you know what progressive complications are, what they're doing in your story and what traps to avoid, what do you do next? Well, first off, do not try to hold all of this in your head as you write a first draft. My goodness. It is way too much for that. These are editing tools, revision principles, not writing rules. I cannot say that emphatically enough. This is for editing, not for writing. When you're writing a first draft, set all of this aside and let yourself sink into your own creative flow. If you try to reverse engineer a story by building progressive complications, according to this list of traps, you will make yourself miserable. You're going to be filled with all of the things that you should not do, and you won't be able to imagine what the possibilities are for your story. But when you've got something written and you're ready to put all these revision tools to work, here's where to start. Pick a scene, any scene from your manuscript. Look at what happens between the inciting incidents and the turning point. Can you find one, two? Three progressive complications. Do they escalate? Do they push the protagonist closer to or farther from their goal? Do they reinforce the starting value of the scene and does the scene move the story along the global value spectrum? And just as important, do they avoid the traps? If the answer is yes, amazing, your progressive complications are doing their job well. If you spot gaps where your scene doesn't check all the boxes, great. Now you know what to revise for. And if all of this feels overwhelmingly technical, like the calculus of storytelling, I get it. That's why I'm here. I. This is my jam. Truly. I gathered all my thoughts on progressive complications for weeks before I wrote this episode. I went over the script several times after it was written, and every single time I thought of a new trap to include or a new layer of nuance to add, I had my editor friend, Kim Kessler peer review all this for me, and based on her feedback, I probably added another 10 minutes of episode, and that was fun for me. I love this kind of analysis because I am an editor. It is my job to know all of this and to run all this analysis in my head so that you can stay in your creative flow. You can dip your toe into this analysis as much as you like, Then nope. Write out and outsource it to me at any time if you'd like, help seeing what's working, what's missing, and how to revise your scenes and stories so that every moment builds towards something powerful. I would 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. And don't forget, you can grab a free progressive complication cheat sheet to print out and reference anytime you're editing. Go to alice sudler.com/ 88 and enter your email address in the form on that page, and I'll send it right to you. All right, this was the progressive complication part of our series. Up next, we've got the Turning Point, crisis Climax and Resolution, so there's much more to come. Until next time, happy editing.