Plan the Middle Before You Write Scene One: What Andhadhun Teaches
Plan the Middle Before You Write Scene One: What Andhadhun Teaches
Learning how to write the middle of a story starts before you write the beginning. If you plan the middle first, scene three stops being a wall.
On Quora, one writer put it plainly: "I get story ideas, but I end up getting writer's block after one or two scenes." I get some version of this on WhatsApp every week. The first two scenes pour out. Then nothing.
Idea toh aa gaya, ab aage kya?
That block has a simple cause. An idea is an opening, not a middle. It gives you a person and a situation. It doesn't give you the ninety minutes after that.
Why do I get writer's block after the first few scenes?
Because the first scenes were already written in your head when the idea arrived. You saw the man and the strange situation he was in. Writing them down felt easy because you were copying.
Scene three is the first scene you have to invent. And you have nothing to invent it from, because you never decided where the story is going or what makes it harder for your character along the way.
Most new writers treat this as a mood problem. They wait to feel inspired again. The fix is a planning problem, and it takes one page.
A short film that became a feature
Andhadhun (2018) was written by Sriram Raghavan, Hemanth M. Rao, Pooja Ladha Surti, Arijit Biswas and Yogesh Chandekar, and directed by Raghavan. It released on 5 October 2018 and won the National Film Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
It began with a French short film, L'Accordeur (The Piano Tuner, 2010), written and directed by Olivier Treiner. The short runs about fourteen minutes. A gifted pianist, broken by failure, works as a piano tuner and pretends to be blind so clients let him into their homes and their private lives. One day he sees something he was never meant to see.
That is a strong setup. It is also, very nearly, only a setup.
In Andhadhun, Ayushmann Khurrana plays Akash, a Pune pianist who fakes blindness, which he treats as an experiment to make himself a better player. The premise came from the short. What the writers had to build was everything after it: two hours of things getting worse for a man whose lie keeps trapping him tighter. That middle is where most of the adaptation work lives.
What Raghavan said about the ending
When Andhadhun came out, Raghavan told The Week that some people had worries about the ending. His point, in my paraphrase, was that the film had been built for a certain kind of ending, and changing it would have turned it into an ordinary story.
I'm not going to tell you what that ending is. Watch the film. It's a twisty one, and you'll enjoy it more knowing nothing.
But notice what his comment tells a writer. The team knew where the story was heading, and they defended it, because the film had been shaped to arrive there.
Now, a clear line so I'm not putting words in anyone's mouth. Raghavan has not said "plan the middle first" as his method. That's my teaching, built from watching how stories like this one hold together. Andhadhun is a good place to see it, because you can lay the short next to the feature and see exactly what had to be added.
How do you write the middle of a story?
You stop thinking of the middle as "more stuff happening". The middle is your character's want running into their fear, again and again, with the cost going up each time.
In advertising, we never started a campaign with the first ad. We started with where we wanted the brand to be in a year, then worked backwards. The first ad was easy once we knew the last one.
A story works the same way. Before scene one, fill one page.
The want. What does your main character want, in a sentence a child could repeat? Not "happiness". Something concrete: get the job, or keep the secret.
The fear. What is the one thing they are most afraid will happen, or be found out? In a story built on a lie, the fear is usually exposure.
Three ways it gets worse. Write three moments where the want and the fear collide, each one costlier than the last. Not three random events. Each should make the next one more likely. This is your middle, and one of these often becomes your interval point.
The ending you drive toward. You can change it later. But you need a destination now, so every scene knows which way to lean.
That's the page. It won't take an hour. It will save you months of staring at scene three.
Do you need to outline before you start writing?
You don't need a forty-page outline. Some writers lose the spark by over-planning. But you do need to know your middle. The one-page plan is the smallest outline that still works: enough to keep moving, light enough to stay surprised.
If your three "gets worse" moments feel weak, the problem is usually conflict. This piece on conflict in fiction will help you sharpen them.
Try this
Take the idea you abandoned after two scenes. Don't open the script. Open a blank page and write four headings: Want, Fear, Three Ways It Gets Worse, Ending.
Fill each one in a single line. For the three middle moments, use this test: if moment two could happen before moment one without changing anything, they're not building. Swap or rewrite until each one causes the next.
Then go back to scene three. You'll find it has somewhere to go.
Quick answers
How do I stop getting stuck after the first few scenes? Plan your middle before you write scene one. Decide your character's want, their fear, three ways things get worse, and the ending you're driving toward.
How do you write the middle of a story? Make the want and the fear collide repeatedly, with the cost rising each time. Each middle moment should cause the next.
What was Andhadhun based on? It was inspired by L'Accordeur (2010), a French short film by Olivier Treiner. The feature's writers built the long middle that the short never needed.
Planning a story from want to ending is part of The Foundation of Storytelling, my live online course in Hindi and English.
Send me your one-page plan on WhatsApp. I'll tell you which of your three moments needs to hurt more.
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