As writers, often we’re advised to drop our characters in ‘the midst of things’ – the Latin term for this is ‘in media res’. A girl running through a forest. A kingdom falling in battle. A boy finding a path that wasn’t there yesterday.
Readers arrive late for a story that’s already underway.
In the same way, we’re born into action. Not only do we inherit family surnames and recipes, but we’re also handed unfinished conversations, habits, patterns, traumas and expectations, all in the hope we’ll continue the narrative.
And look, here I am, talking about middles before I’ve introduced beginnings.
“A whole is what has a beginning and middle and end.” – Aristotle, Poetics
Childhood messaging repeatedly reinforces this idea. For example, a child explaining to a caregiver what happened in a fight is encouraged to share the scenario from the beginning. In school, we colour diagrams of story mountains and then label exposition, rising action, climax and resolution, as if stories were as predictable as geological formations.
As any writer will tell you, stories – like cats and houseplants – rarely behave according to instructions.
“What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.” – T.S Eliot, Four Quartets
That said, as creators and consumers of stories, we know that context and timing changes everything. A closed door means one thing in chapter one and something else entirely in the final pages. The same event can be a tragedy, initiation or plot twist, depending on where it sits on the timeline.
This also feels close to lived experience. Jobs end and new identities emerge. Relationships dissolve and unexpected opportunities arrive. Children grow up and a different version of parenthood begins. Endings keep disguising themselves as beginnings, which feel more like a process of germination than an absolute starting point.
Often we begin something new in our life during a moment of tension or change, hoping to discover the rest of the story along the way. When we recognise we’re in what writers affectionately call ‘the messy middle’, a season of uncertainty feels less alarming. This is the time that characters (and often their authors) become confused, change direction, lose certainty and reach a crossroads. Yet it is the middle that turns out not to be a failure of structure, but ultimately the backbone that empowers the story and its characters.
And the ending, that place where nothing further is expected. The end, or is it? A story ends when the author stops typing, or does it end days later when a sentence or image returns to the reader?
It can be disorientating not knowing where we are in our own story and whether we’re in the midst of a prologue, plot twist, dark night of the soul, or chapter transition. Is it a beginning, messy middle or an ending of something? Perhaps the question we can gift ourselves is: Where do I think I am in my story right now?
Once we’ve bookmarked the chapter, we can stop demanding certainty from the plot and begin to trust the process of becoming, as the larger narrative unfolds on the horizon.
Photo by Eilis Garvey on Unsplash