What your body knows before you do

I want to start this newsletter with something that happened to me recently, something frightening, which some of you may recognise.

I had been driving a lot. Long motorway journeys, more than an hour and a half each way, week after week. I was doing it again when a lorry came fast up behind me and something in me simply gave way. My arms and legs began to shake. My breathing changed, silently at first, and then I was on the hard shoulder, hyperventilating, unable to trust my own body to do something it has done thousands of times before. I drove the rest of the way on A roads, shaking, feeling a strange fizzing and wobbliness in my arms and legs, as though the signals between my brain and my hands had been interrupted.

The doctor was straightforward about it. Your body, she said, is telling you to stop.

The strange thing was that I hadn't felt stressed. The pressure had been building so quietly, so consistently, that I hadn't registered it accumulating. There was no single moment I could point to and say: that was when it became too much. It had simply crept up, and my nervous system had reached its limit before I had any conscious sense of approaching one.

I posted about it last week, tentatively, mentioning the sandwich generation, mentioning anxiety, saying I hadn't been able to show up the week before. The response moved me. Many people reached out to ask if I was all right. And what struck me in those messages was how many women recognised something in what I described, not necessarily the motorway, but the accumulation. The sense of being pulled in several directions at once, none of them dramatic in isolation, all of them quietly relentless. Elderly parents whose needs are growing. Children who still need you, even when they are nearly grown. The work you are trying to build, the thing that is yours. The writing that keeps getting pushed to the edges of the day.

This is the sandwich generation, and if you are reading this letter, there is a reasonable chance you are living somewhere inside it.

I have been thinking about what my body knew before I did. And I have been thinking, as I tend to do, about what this means for the novels we are writing.

The middle of a novel is where most manuscripts stall. Writers often describe it as the place where momentum drains away, where the story starts to feel flat or circular, where they lose confidence in what they are doing. When I work with a writer on her middle section, one of the first things I look for is whether the pressure on the protagonist is accumulating steadily enough. Not dramatically. Not in great set pieces. Quietly. Consistently. Scene by scene, the way a motorway journey builds without you noticing, until something arrives fast from behind and your body gives way.

The mistake most writers make in the middle is not that nothing happens. It is that what happens does not accumulate. Each scene may be perfectly competent in itself, but the pressure is released between scenes rather than carried forward. The protagonist gets a moment of relief, a conversation that reassures her, a day that goes well. And the reader, like you on the long drive, stops registering that anything is building.

Your job in the middle of your novel is to be the lorry. Not the crash, not the crisis, not the dramatic confrontation. The thing that makes the accumulation visible. The moment when your protagonist's nervous system, like mine on the hard shoulder, reaches its limit before she has any conscious sense of approaching one.

If your middle feels flat, it may not be that you have written the wrong scenes. It may be that the pressure has been allowed to dissipate too politely, too regularly, between them.

I am grateful that I have my sister to share the load with my elderly father’s needs. I am, as my doctor suggested, trying to listen to what my body knows before I do.

And I am back at my desk, thinking about stories, glad to be here.

If your novel's middle feels flat and you're not sure why, a Story Clarity Session might help you see what's happening. You can find out more and book here.