You're stuck in the middle of a big project

I wrote a vast, sprawling tale, so I know intimately the overwhelm of a big work's middle — and I can help you through it. The middle always feels like a formless mess — the beginning had the clarity of a fresh idea and the end will have the clarity of a finished form, but the middle is the necessary chaos between, where the material has grown too large to hold in mind and has not yet resolved into order, so this overwhelming feeling is not a verdict on the project or on you but the ordinary experience of every big work's middle. Shrink your focus to the next small piece — you cannot hold the whole enormous thing at once, but you can always make the single next section, and the large work gets made one graspable piece at a time. And trust that the shape will come clear in the making and revising — the form of a large work is largely discovered in building and reworking it, not known in advance, so keep producing the pieces and let the whole find its form later. What is the next small piece you could make?