Missing Jigsaw pieces

My life is currently blighted by missing jigsaw pieces.

These are jigsaws I'm designing myself, and the pieces are not hidden under the sofa, nor have they have they been eaten by the hamster.

They just might not exist, or they might be just out of reach. My solution is to write loads about where they might be, what they might look like.

Enough of the metaphor - I now have about six pieces of fiction started, and they all seem to have reached the same state... I hae a start, I have rems of nnotes about character. In most cases I have an ending too. But I'm missing a middle, a key motivation to get me from A to C.

I'm not going to call it writers block. Like Alan Bennett* I dislike that term. Its writers laziness, it might be writers overstretched ambition. It might be solvable, it might not.

I know the solution is to keep riding, but maybe change horses. Trouble is recently I've just started off on a fresh hosre, a new journey. the other trouble is I've just started another metaphor that I don't think I'll be able sustain.

So I have Rosa. She owns a touristy nick-nack shop she hates. She is thinking of burning it down. A young man breaks into her shop. He ties her up. He has a knife. And in my head she is going to fall in love with him. in the next 1500 words.

Puh.

(*As he wrote in at least one of his diaries. He is part of the problem though. I spend so much of my time daydreamingly comparing myself to my favourite writers is just gets so damned difficult when I get stuck.)