You give your draft to someone you trust and they say: “I liked it, but it dragged a bit around the middle.” Thanks. Now what? It’s like when your car makes a weird noise. Hearing it is easy. Figuring out where it’s coming from is the hard part.
There’s almost always a specific cause, and you can almost always find it by looking at your novel’s data instead of rereading the whole thing. Here are five common symptoms and where to look.
From symptom to where to look
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What you notice
What’s usually behind it
Nothing changes after the midpoint: the same move, over and over.
Where to look
Structure: the beats in the middle
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What you notice
What’s usually behind it
A character goes five chapters or more without showing up.
Where to look
Checks: characters who vanish
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What you notice
What’s usually behind it
A subplot sits still for four chapters or more.
Where to look
Subplots by chapter
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What you notice
What’s usually behind it
Four or more in a row end with the same charge (+ or −).
Where to look
Scene card: how it ends
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What you notice
What’s usually behind it
Over 300 words in “What happens” or the notes.
Where to look
Checks: this is starting to look like prose
1. The middle goes on forever
The most common symptom, and the vaguest. Your reader can’t tell you why, but somewhere between chapters 8 and 15 they checked their phone four times.
What’s usually behind it: in the second half of the second act, nothing important changes. Things happen, but they’re the same thing over and over. Picture a draft of Wanted: One Dragon where Mara questions the hairdresser, then Julia from the festival committee, then the twins at the bar, and every interview runs the same way: ask, terrible alibi, next. Fun twice. By the fifth time, not so much.
Where to look: Structure. Check the beats in the middle. Is there a real “Upside Down,” something that changes what the story is about? (Here, it’s the cracked shell in the oven: nobody stole the egg, it hatched.) Do the beats after it have scenes, or is everything piled up in “Now for the Fun Part”?
No software can detect “the middle drags”, and Sunday Plot can’t either. But seeing your beats with their scenes makes it pretty obvious.
2. A character vanishes
“Wait, what happened to Bruno?” It could easily happen in an early draft of Wanted: One Dragon: Bruno, the baker, shows up in chapter 1, hands Mara the line that sums up the theme, and doesn’t appear again until chapter 7, right when the story needs the reader to care about him. But by then the reader has forgotten him.
What’s usually behind it: the character matters to you, but on the page they got left out. They don’t need a whole scene. Sometimes it’s enough for Mara to stop by for bread, or for someone to mention him. In the finished version, Bruno is listening from the bar in chapter 3, and in chapter 6 Mara finds scorched crumbs of his bread under the library window. Not much, and it’s enough.
It might be on purpose. Bruno has a dragon hidden in his oven, so he has good reasons to lie low. Still, it’s better as a decision than an accident.
Sunday Plot flags a character who’s missing for five chapters or more and then comes back. Being there counts, being mentioned counts, and so does narrating.
3. A subplot stalls
The same problem, but for story threads. Say the thing between Mara and Alex starts strong, sits still for four chapters while the investigation moves on, and then suddenly, at the end, they kiss. The reader missed the part in between.
Where to look: “Subplots by chapter”, a grid that shows which chapters move each thread forward. Stretches of four chapters or more with no progress are striped, so they jump out right away. Sunday Plot flags them too.
4. Every scene ends the same way
This one is hard to spot from the inside. Each scene works fine, but in a row they wear you out. Usually it’s because they all land in the same direction: everything goes wrong for your protagonist, again and again, or everything goes right.
Every scene card has a “What’s at stake” field (Mara’s trust in the town, say) and, for that value, how the scene starts and how it ends: + or −. If every interview ends on a minus, with nobody telling “the new one” anything, the reader learns the pattern and stops wondering what will happen. You only need to break it once: the twins at the bar let slip that they’ve spent a year betting on whether the egg was “alive.” One scene that ends on a plus and the rhythm can breathe again.
Sunday Plot flags four or more scenes in a row that end with the same charge. A scene with no charge breaks the run.
5. Scene cards that have turned into prose
You open a scene card and the “What happens” box holds four hundred words, dialogue included. That’s not a mistake, it’s enthusiasm: you were writing and didn’t notice. But a card that reads like a chapter stops working as a map, and the scene ends up half-written in the wrong place.
Once it goes past 300 words, Sunday Plot lets you know. Whatever came out, save it in your manuscript. On the card, three lines: what happens.
Questions, not errors
In Sunday Plot, all of this comes together on the Checks screen. There are a few more (a character who dies and keeps showing up afterwards, or a narrator who only tells one scene), and they’re all phrased as questions, because a lot of the time the answer is “yes, that’s on purpose”. Each one takes you to the place where it gets fixed. If you decide something is fine as it is, you move on to the next one. That’s it.
One honest note: the checks only see what you’ve told them. If your scenes have no chapter, no characters and no ending charge, there isn’t much to look at. That’s why, in “Look over what you have”, “Fill in what each scene is missing” comes before the checks.
For today
Pick one of the five symptoms, whichever sounds most familiar, and find an example in your novel. Just one. Next to it, write down whether it’s on purpose or not.
In Sunday Plot, open Checks and start with the first one. If it’s on purpose, move on, no guilt. If it isn’t, you know where to pick up tomorrow.