What's a metaphor for a metaphor?

Listening to: Get some sleep, Bic Runga

This writing thing is hard. It's like when you meet a new love. At the start it's all you can think about. You can't wait to sit down and write again. You can't concentrate on anything else because there's all these scenarios, diaglogues, plots and sub-plots and moods, swimming around in your mind. And you're discovering new things about your characters and even yourself as a writer.

However, as with any passionate beginning, the fire burns bright and then dims down to a steady glow as the more denser fuel burns. And it's the dense fuel that gives a fire it's heat, but if that dense fuel is not replensihed the fire can cool to just embers, or worse completely go cold.

My fire was down to a few glowing coals until last week when I found some more fuel to throw on.

I have written a piece that fits in somewhere near the end of the story - possibly even as the final chapter - and adds a nice little twist on something the reader has been lead to take for granted for almost the entire story. No, it's not a Scooby Doo ending, Old Man Withers isn't going to confess that he 'would have gotten away with it, if it wasn't for those pesky kids'. Nor is it a silly Hollywood ending. It's just a strange turn of events.

So, I have a beginning, an end and some stuff in the middle... but that doesn't make it complete, does it? That middle stuff has gaps in it; some are huge and some are just hairline fractures.

It's like a railway (another metaphor, sorry), there's a station at both ends but the rails haven't been layed all the way through... and to be honest, there's a chasm that I've yet to find a suitable bridge to span its void. I was descibing my plight to a friend and decided it wasn't a 'writer's block', it's a 'writer's chasm' because I can see the other side I just can't find a way to cross it (that's the last metaphor for the post, I promise.)

So, dear reader, that's where I'm at. Teetering on the edge of a writer's chasm, with bits of story on either side just awaiting a bridge.

Does anyone know any good bridge-makers?


Word count: 16,697