How do you master the messy middle of your story? Don’t pack it with filler. Escalate the tension with propulsive progressive complications.

You open your story with an amazing inciting incident. You hook your readers’ attention right away, promising them a brilliant tale they’re going to love. You send your protagonist on a journey in pursuit of a goal. You kick off the first act with explosive, propulsive, unputdownable energy.

And then . . .

. . . you reach the middle.

The messy middle.

The quiet doldrums of your story, where plot momentum goes to die.

Somehow, you’ve got to get your protagonist—and your readers—from the exciting promise of the inciting incident at the beginning to the satisfying payoff of the climax at the end.

And you’ve got to fill enough pages to stretch each scene out to scene length and the book out to book length.

So what do you do? Throw a bunch of stuff in for your characters to do and hope that it somehow works and keeps your readers entertained? Or fluff out your sentences with extra words, describing everything your characters encounter in obsessive detail?

Nope. This is the space of the progressive complications.

Not irrelevant stuff. Not distracting fluff. But unmissable, unskippable, unputdownable rising conflict that raises the stakes, prepares the protagonist for the climax, and compels your readers to keep turning pages.

Let’s demystify the messy middle so you can make your progressive complications some of the best parts of your story.

How to Edit the Progressive Complications

Today, we’re continuing our deep dive into my favorite story structure framework, the Six Elements of Story. We’re putting the second element, progressive complications, under the microscope to see what they are and what makes them work.

Last month, we studied the inciting incident in obsessive detail. And I think that was possibly one of my most popular episodes ever in the history of this podcast. So I’m pretty sure you’re going to love what I have to share with you here.

It turns out, though, that I have a lot to say about progressive complications. So I’m splitting this article into two parts.

In this installment, I’m going to share:

• The way I define the progressive complications
• Where in the story the progressive complications appear
• What I’m watching for as an editor when I evaluate progressive complications

And in the next installment, I’ll share the common traps I see writers fall into when they’re writing their progressive complications.

You don’t need to have read the inciting incident article in order to follow everything I’ll share here. But I am going to assume you’re at least a little aware of the Six Elements of Story framework. If that’s totally new to you, I recommend starting with The 6 Essential Elements of Every Novel, Act, and Scene.

I’ve also put together a free cheat sheet with everything I’ll cover in this article. You can print it out and keep it at hand, easy to reference as you edit. Enter your email in the form below, and I’ll send it right to you.

We’ve got a lot to cover. So let’s dive right in!

Progressive Complications Definition

Let’s start with the definition. Here’s how I define the progressive complications:

A series of complications happen that escalate the conflict. These events might make things better or worse, but they certainly make things more complicated.

What does that mean?

The inciting incident sets your protagonist on a path in pursuit of a goal. But they can’t achieve their goal immediately. If it were that simple, they’d have it already.

So they embark on a course of action that should take them towards their goal. At least, based on their existing worldview—that’s everything they know and understand and believe about the world right now—based on all that, they think it will take them towards their goal.

And along the way, they encounter challenges, things that move them closer to their goal or throw up obstacles in their way. Those are the progressive complications.

Basically, they’re all the things that challenge your protagonist and raise the stakes on their way to achieving their goal. They culminate in the turning point, which is a special progressive complication with several additional jobs to do. It’s the moment when their strategy and tactics fail to such a degree that it breaks their existing worldview. The protagonist irrevocably changes and so the story irrevocably changes.

I’ll put the turning point under a microscope in another article, but for now it’s enough to know that it’s technically also a progressive complication. And the job of the progressive complications is to carry the reader to the global crisis of the story, when the stakes are the highest they’ve been so far.

Where in the story are the progressive complications?

As you can probably guess from that definition alone, the progressive complications span a lot of the story! Sixty percent or more of a scene, act, or global story can be spent in the progressive complications.

If I had to mark percentages, I’d estimate that they tend to start somewhere around the 15% mark and wrap up somewhere around the 70% mark. Those are really loose ballpark numbers, though. The point is, they’re the middle of the story, and they’re the bulk of the story.

In short, the progressive complications matter.

This, by the way, is why I call my favorite story structure framework the Six Elements of Story.

If you’re an avid student of craft books, you’re probably familiar with Shawn Coyne’s Story Grid. I’m a Story Grid certified editor, and Story Grid is where I was introduced to this framework.

But the framework as Story Grid describes it is called the Five Commandments of Storytelling. The Five Commandments are:

1. Inciting Incident
2. Turning Point Progressive Complication
3. Crisis
4. Climax
5. Resolution

In essence, the Five Commandments skip over the progressive complications and jump straight to the turning point.

On the one hand, I sort of get why—as you’ll see when we put the turning point under the microscope, there are very specific things that are set up in the inciting incident, irreversibly challenged in the turning point, and then paid off in the climax. The turning point does have an essential job to do.

But the progressive complications are sixty percent of the story! I felt adamantly that the progressive complications also have an essential job to do, because no one wants to buy a novel with the middle two-thirds sliced out of it.

Plus, this is the messy middle of the story, the part where writers tend to feel lost, adrift in storytelling doldrums, unsure what needs to happen between the setup of the inciting incident and the payoff of the climax.

So I kept the progressive complications in the framework. I renamed it the Six Elements of Story to recognize their significance. I set out to figure out what, exactly, the progressive complications must accomplish.

And this is what I found.

What am I editing in the progressive complications?

There are eight qualities I’m watching for throughout the progressive complications.

1. The progressive complications escalate.

Each complication raises the stakes higher than the last. They don’t repeat the same conflict at the same intensity with the same stakes—they raise it all.

Here’s an example from season 1, episode 4 of the TV show Younger:

Our protagonist, Liza, and her friend Kelsey go to a bar to celebrate Kelsey landing a major project at work. Kelsey asks Liza to keep her from drinking too much, because tomorrow she has the first meeting to kick off the project, and she wants to be sharp and ready in the morning.

So Liza’s goal is to mitigate Kelsey’s drinking without ruining Kelsey’s celebration.

Progressive complication: Kelsey has one drink, Liza encourages her to stop there, and Kelsey agrees.

Progressive complication: Kelsey’s boyfriend, Thad, shows up and orders a round of shots. Liza reluctantly agrees that one round is fine, and they drink.

Progressive complication: Thad orders six more rounds of shots despite Liza’s protests. Kelsey sides with Thad rather than Liza.

Progressive complication: It’s now after midnight and Kelsey is very drunk. She decides they should all go to Liza’s boyfriend’s tattoo parlor and get tattoos. Thad decides to go home and leaves Kelsey in Liza’s care. Liza tries to get Kelsey to go home, but Kelsey has already called the Uber to the tattoo parlor.

Progressive complication: While they’re in the Uber, and before Liza can stop her, Kelsey drunk texts her new client that he’s hot.

Progressive complication: When they get to the tattoo parlor, it’s closed. Liza’s boyfriend, Josh, lives upstairs, so again before Liza can stop her, Kelsey picks up a rock and throws it at his window, breaking the window.

Progressive complication: Josh wakes up and comes to the door—with another woman in a nightgown.

Do you see how the complications escalate? From Kelsey agreeing to stop drinking to wasted Kelsey throwing a rock through Josh’s window?

With each new complication, the stakes become higher, and Liza’s ability to achieve her goal—protecting Kelsey from the consequences of drinking too much—becomes more important and more difficult.

That’s the progressive part of progressive complications: they are steadily increasing in intensity, escalating inexorably until they culminate in the turning point.

2. The progressive complications can be positive or negative—never neutral.

When progressive complications are positive, they move the protagonist closer to their goal. They’re a happy opportunity, a piece of good news, a helping hand.

Kelsey agreeing to stop after one drink? That’s positive.

When they’re negative, they move the protagonist farther away from their goal. They’re an unforeseen obstacle, a failure of a plan, a new enemy.

Kelsey’s boyfriend showing up and pressuring them to drink many rounds of shots? That’s negative.

Both positive and negative developments can be progressive complications. Complication doesn’t mean bad. Positive things also complicate the situation.

The only thing they can’t be is neutral!

3. The progressive complications can be active or revelatory.

Active means they’re something that happens—an external event.

Revelatory means that they’re the reveal of new information—something that the protagonist didn’t know, or perhaps the reader didn’t know.

All those times Kelsey dismisses Liza’s protests and drinks the shots Thad orders? Those are actions.

The discovery that Liza’s boyfriend has another woman staying over? That’s revelatory.

Don’t get too hung up here—you don’t need to evaluate every single progressive complication in your story to note whether they’re active or revelatory.

But if you find that your progressive complications aren’t escalating or feel repetitive, especially on the level of the global story, it might be because you have a long stretch of only active or only revelatory complications.

4. The progressive complications can be causal or coincidental—but tread carefully with coincidences.

A causal progressive complication is the result of a character’s action. Kelsey called Thad and told him about her work win, therefore he came to join her at the bar, therefore he bought her too many rounds of shots, and therefore Kelsey kept drinking shots. This put Liza in a tough position to either 1) let Kesley keep taking shots or 2) force the celebration to stop. There’s a clear cause-and-effect relationship that connects every event to the ones before and after it.

A coincidental progressive complication is the result of random chance. It’s raining, or it’s sunny. You’re driving to work, and you get rear ended. Kelsey throws a rock through Liza’s boyfriend’s window, and it just so happens this is a night when he has another woman over. There’s no cause-and-effect relationship connecting that to other events; it’s simply the randomness of life, that sometimes things happen that we’re not expecting.

Tread carefully with coincidences in your story. There are two principles to keep in mind here:

First, coincidences work best when they’re negative rather than positive.

Negative coincidences ring true—they reflect the random chaos we experience every day.

Positive coincidences feel like a deus ex machina rescue from our problems.

I have yet to read a novel where the climax is a character winning a million dollars in the lottery and that solving all their problems.

I can think of several stories, though, where the inciting incident is the character winning a lottery, with consequences that are undesirable and even deadly.

Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, The Lottery by Shirley Jackson, the episode “Luck of the Draw” from the TV show Sliders, and the movie It Could Happen to You all begin with the random chance of winning a lottery—and then challenge their characters to navigate a lot of cause-and-effect–based negative fallout from those coincidental wins.

So be careful with positive coincidences, and especially avoid using them as a deus ex machina rescue for your characters.

And second, coincidences work best when they’re used sparingly.

Too many, and you’ll destroy the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief.

So sprinkle in coincidences sparingly, and look for the cause-and-effect trajectory connecting your progressive complications.

It’s especially helpful to watch for those cause-and-effect connections on the level of the global story. I don’t typically explicitly analyze the cause-and-effect chain on the scene level, but it can give you real insight into plot holes and logical gaps in the big picture story.

5. The progressive complications come from outside the protagonist OR are a result of a choice the protagonist makes.

The key here is: progressive complications are not choices the character makes. They can be something that happens to the protagonist because of someone else’s choices. They can be the result, the impact, the outcome of the choice the protagonist makes. But they are not themselves choices the protagonist makes.

Choices the protagonist makes are essential. They drive the plot and they give the protagonist agency. The protagonist will be making choices about how to respond to progressive complications constantly.

But the progressive complications are not themselves the protagonist’s choices.

Back to our example scene with Liza and Kelsey. Remember, Liza is our protagonist, and her goal is to mitigate Kelsey’s drinking without ruining Kelsey’s celebration.

Every time Liza tries to tell Kelsey and her boyfriend to slow down, to stop drinking, to take it easy, to go home? That’s Liza’s choice, Liza’s action, Liza’s agency. It’s not a progressive complication.

Every time Kelsey refuses, drinks more shots, calls an Uber, throws a rock? Those are all challenges coming from outside of Liza. They’re choices Kelsey makes and actions Kelsey takes. They are progressive complications, and Liza’s task is to figure out how the heck to respond.

6. On the scene level, there are typically 1 to 3 progressive complications. On the level of the global story, every scene is a progressive complication.

There’s no one right number of progressive complications—you can have as many as you need at every level of story. And to some degree, anything can be a progressive complication. Get too granular in your analysis, and you could read every line of dialogue back and forth between characters as its own individual progressive complication.

I don’t recommend looking that closely. You’ll hit a point of diminishing returns in your analysis, and you’ll start to miss the forest for the trees.

You could get lost in the slight pitch of new anger in Kelsey’s voice as she tells Liza no for the fifth time, and miss that all that’s happened for six pages is Kelsey drinking five shots—your progressive complications aren’t escalating.

What you want to watch for are the major plot developments. Kelsey’s boyfriend showing up. Kelsey calling an Uber. Kelsey throwing a rock.

There are typically one to three major plot developments like this in a scene. A long scene could have more, but as long as you have at least one, you’re fine.

Zoom all the way out to the big picture, and every scene should be a progressive complication. If it doesn’t escalate the conflict and move the story forward in some way, it hasn’t earned its place in the story.

Kelsey’s big night of drinking moves the larger episode plot forward in three ways:

1. Kelsey will oversleep, be very hungover, and miss the meeting with the new client in the morning.
2. She’s already made their relationship very unprofessional by drunk texting him that he’s hot.
3. And she’s going to blame Liza for not doing what Kelsey asked and preventing her from drinking too much—which is to say, it’s Liza’s fault that Kelsey’s kicking things off so poorly with her new client.

It’s a scene full of progressive complications, and it’s one progressive complication in the larger episode.

And now, the seventh quality I look for in the progressive complications, and the biggest reason I separate them out from Story Grid’s Five Commandments:

7. On the scene level, the progressive complications reinforce the starting value. On the global level, they move along the spectrum of the value.

What are the progressive complications doing for sixty percent of the story? What unskippable, irreplaceable role do they serve that’s not done by any other element of story?

They are emphasizing the “Before” side of the value shift.

Remember, stories are about change. The inciting incident establishes that things are one way, a “before.” In the turning point, crisis, and climax, the value will shift, and by the resolution, we’ll be in the “after,” the new world order, the result of the change.

The job of the progressive complications is to emphasize the “before.”

This looks a little different on the level of the scene versus the global story, so let’s break them down.

On the scene level, things start one way and end another way. Kelsey is out celebrating to going home (that’s the end of the scene, by the way—Liza shoves her in another Uber and bodily forces her to end her night).

The shift is binary—she’s out, and then she’s going home. Liza is being patient with her and going along with her, and then Liza is fed up and done and taking control.

All the progressive complications—the boyfriend, the shots, the tattoo idea, the Uber, the rock—they all emphasize how “out celebrating” Kelsey is, and how “patient and going along” Liza is. Their whole entire job is to make us really feel that “before” side of the value shift, the first half of a binary value.

Zoom out to the big picture and look at the story as a whole, and it’s a little bit different.

The value shift in a novel isn’t binary—it’s a spectrum. Consider love vs. hate, for example. That spectrum looks like this:

Hate masked as love → hate → dislike → indifference → like → love

In an enemies to lovers romance, the lovers will begin way at the “hate” end of that spectrum. And by the end of the story, they’ll move to love.

But they won’t spend sixty percent of the story sitting immovably at hate. The story won’t spend all the progressive complications emphasizing unchanging hatred, then flip magically to the opposite end of the spectrum and bring them all the way to love at the turning point. Of course not—that would be insufferably boring for most of the story, and then unbelievable and ridiculous at the end.

So the job of the progressive complications—the unskippable, unmissable, essential job, the reason you can’t just cut sixty percent from the middle of every novel—is to move the story along the spectrum of the value.

The progressive complications might move the story forwards and backwards along that spectrum. Some scenes will bring the story closer to the positive end of the spectrum, and others will push it to the negative end.

Think again of our enemies to lovers romance.

In one scene, he might do something that builds her trust in him, despite her determination to hate him. On the scene level, they go from distrust to trust, from hatred to grudging dislike.

And then in another scene, he might betray that trust—trust to distrust again, and from grudging dislike to even deeper hatred.

Within the scene, the value shift is generally binary. On the level of the global story, the value shifts along the entire spectrum.

And the role of the progressive complications is to reinforce the before side of the value shift, on the scene level; and on the level of the global story, to move the story through all the chaos and drama of the value spectrum before it reaches its final after state.

Before our enemies-to-lovers reach their steady, secure love.

And finally:

8. The progressive complications are aligned with the story’s genre.

I’ve put this one last, because if your progressive complications are doing their job well in terms of the value shift, then they’re also passing this last test with flying colors.

Because the progressive complications move the story along the spectrum of the value shift, this also means that the progressive complications are aligned with the story’s genre.

That’s because the value at stake is defined by the genre. Or the genre is defined by the value at stake—however you like to look at it. Either way, they’re inextricably connected.

That means that those enemies to lovers probably won’t suddenly discover a dead body somewhere in the middle of the progressive complications. A dead body points us to the life/death stakes of an action story or the justice/tyranny stakes of a crime story. If the enemies suddenly got distracted by an investigation, it would cease to be a romance story and become a crime story instead.

Unless, of course, you’re intentionally blending genres, and this is, say, an enemies to lovers mafia story. That means the dead body is a progressive complication that’s relevant to the crime plot.

But in order to not lose the thread of the romance, you’ll need to make it relevant to the love plot, too.

How does discovering the dead body impact how our lovers feel about each other? Does it force them to work together, and they start to like each other a little more? Do they suspect each other of the crime, and their fragile alliance begins to erode?

Remind yourself of the change at the heart of your story. Keep the value spectrum in mind and check for how each progressive complication moves the story along it. That way, you’ll ensure that every progressive complication is aligned with your story’s genre, and nothing feels out of the blue or irrelevant to your readers.

Recap: The 8 Qualities of Effective Progressive Complications

So there you have it—the eight qualities I’m looking for in effective progressive complications. Here they are again.

The progressive complications . . .

1. Escalate.
2. Are positive or negative—never neutral.
3. Can be active or revelatory.
4. Can be causal or coincidental (but tread carefully with coincidences).
5. Come from outside the protagonist, or are the result of a choice the protagonist makes.
6. Typically include 1 to 3 progressive complications on the scene level, and on the global level, every scene is a progressive complication.
7. On the scene level, reinforce the beginning value; and on the global level, move along the spectrum of the value.
8. Are aligned with the story’s genre.

Make Sense of Your Messy Middle

So now you know what progressive complications are, how they function in a scene and in a global story, and what I’m looking for when I evaluate them.

But there’s another essential part of the conversation we haven’t touched yet—what happens when they don’t work. What does it look like when progressive complications fall flat? What mistakes do writers commonly make, and how do those missteps affect your story—and your readers?

That’s what I’ll be covering in the next installment in this series.

I’ll walk you through the five most common traps I see in manuscripts—how they show up, what they do to the reader’s experience, and how to fix them in revision.

So if you’ve ever had a scene—or a story—feel slow, repetitive, scattered, or like it’s almost working but not quite, don’t miss the next installment in this series, coming four weeks from now.

In the meantime, you can download a free Progressive Complication Cheat Sheet to keep all of this in front of you while you revise. Fill out the form below and I’ll send it straight to your inbox:

And if all of this feels overwhelmingly technical, like the calculus of storytelling, I get it. That’s why I’m here.

I study stories in granular detail and run this level of analysis in my head so that you can stay in your storytelling flow and think about these concepts only as much or as little as you like.

Progressive complications are where so many writers get stuck—not because they don’t know how to write them, but because this part of the story feels like a foggy, uncharted stretch between the big moments. It’s easy to lose your sense of direction here.

If you’d like help seeing what’s working, what’s missing, and how to revise your scenes so every moment builds toward something powerful, I’d love to work with you.

Fill out the form on this page to tell me about your story, and I’ll be in touch.

Until next time, happy editing!