To my great shame, I have three public fanfictions under my belt. Not about having written them, specifically. Rather, it’s the fact that all of them are unfinished. The most popular is a lengthy slow burn set in Forks, Washington, where Twilight’s Charlie Swan and Harry Potter’s Remus Lupin meet and fall in love—with my self-insert. I think I’ve hit a niche with that one, because that story gets the occasional like to this day. I guess you either age out of Twilight or realize Charlie was the only one worth giving the time of day to. And bam, after a good fourteen chapters of yearning (and a surprisingly intense detective plot) they kiss. On the mouth. Wild.

The other two fics similarly involve a Dutch-coded, middle aged protagonist who has ash blond hair and a talent for yearning and a quiet competence. There’s a clear pattern here. A sort of idealised future me, if you will. One of the fics is set in the Hobbit universe, the other in Disco Elysium. My Hobbit-self gets with Thorin, whereas the Disco Elysium-self gets with… the Pale? His female ex partner? A barman? It’s hard to explain, but it’s the better of the three by quite a margin!

What all three of these works have in common, however, is that they were written with furious passion and consistency right up to the 60k word mark. After that, my confidence wavers, the updates get less frequent, and the fanfic dies a quiet death. Why does this happen? What makes 60k words so pivotal? There must be an explanation behind it. I’m no scientist myself, but I have a couple of theories:

1. The midway point of the story is where tension shifts. Some smaller point of tension has been resolved, and without further momentum, the entire thing comes apart. 60k seems to be the spot where this happens to my stories.
2. At the 60k point there’s enough writing down on paper that perfectionism draws things to a standstill. There’s too much material that needs editing, plot holes that need patching, and it all becomes impossible to keep track of. 60k is simply the stage where there’s too much text.
3. The narrative line becomes cloudy at the midway point. How does Act 1 propel the characters into the other Acts? Is the setup strong enough for the resolution? Does the planned resolution still fit the stuff that’s on paper? It comes back to planning, and suddenly all my impulsive plot decisions up to this point derail the original trajectory.

Take my Hobbit fanfiction. Dirk of Middendijk (a blue elf, or Holwë, from the swamps of the river Lhûne, whose people are characterized by their love of commerce, wooden shoes, and smuggling pipeweed) has a complex relationship with Thorin Oakenshield. At the 20k mark they get in a fight, and by 60k they tentatively make up. The moment this happens, I lose grip on the narrative. How do I bridge the gap between reconciliation and Smaug’s eventual slaying? There should be plenty of other sources of tension, but they don’t seem to suffice. Sex seems to be something I can write towards, but never quite from. The same thing happens in Disco Elysium, after all. The moment I finish the scene where Johannes and Vince hook up is when the entirety of the plot becomes fuzzy. For Twilight/HP it’s even worse, there it's a single kiss that did it. All the tension evaporated, and before you know it there’s no more chapter updates.
How to fix this? It’d be nice to finish at least one story, but I get the sense that the common denominator here is yearning. Perhaps it’s a question of learning the follow-up steps.