There was definite relief and excitement after I wrote the first third of my novel, around the turn of the 20^th century in Valentine, Nebraska. From what I’d already written, I ‘distilled’ an outline—a series of large post-It notes that captured the dramatic essence of each chapter. Pink represents chapters in close third POV (point of view) that alternate between two main characters. Yellow chapters are the matriarchs who know them and offer first-person accounts of their lives.

The two main characters fall in love, marry, and move into the house he built for her on his homestead in the rugged Sandhills. Despite the seventeen-year age gap between them, they settle in, have a child, and run their sheep farm.

In Part II, they battle blizzards and droughts, amend the soil with manure to grow vegetables, contend with a drop in the price of wool, and sheep that die, mired in mud. I write in excruciating detail, but somehow the life goes out of it, as if I don’t know what a chapter is anymore. I come face-to-face with the “mushy middle.” It’s a real thing.

I reread the troublesome material as if someone else had written it and ask the question, “So what?” Something I should do more often. The answer becomes clear. When the text devolves into, “This happened, then this happened, then this happened,” my characters’ relationship takes a back seat to the events in their lives. The novel is about them finding strength in the face of overwhelming odds, but that dramatic arc disappears.

Out of desperation, I write the last scene of the book. My heroine moves to southern California after her husband dies. Her daughter, who is in college there, falls in love with Eddie who takes her on an epic motorcycle ride through the canyons and out to the coast.

This tentative ending gives me a fuller picture of where the story needs to go. It widens my lens from the events themselves to the estrangement those events cause between the two main characters in Part II. My heroine, trained to weather hardship from an early age, reinvents herself again and again. She takes control while her husband struggles with his arthritic, aging body. He regains his regard for her even as they lose the sheep farm in the Depression and are forced to take refuge in a neighbor’s house. At the end of Part II, she goes into debt to start a dairy near town. He hugs her and says sweetly, “But you don’t know nothin’ about how to run a dairy. You’ll end up working yourself and the family to death.”

Now, there’s a set up for part III.