Embrace The Chaos, And Trust Me, You’ll Write

My secret to starting and finishing stories: “The Crack Draft”

Stories are free-flowing, magnificent things that cannot be contained. They burst to life in full color within the mind palace, chaotic, explosive, and delightfully disjointed. They’re visceral, intuitive. I’m sure we’ve all experienced the pleasure pain of listening to a song on loop, relentlessly orchestrating the most stunning, gripping scene imaginable in the creative astral. Unfortunately… it would ideally take place at the climax of a book series’s fifth installment or the end of a film trilogy.

The imagination is not meant to be comprehended. In fact, it is fundamentally incomprehensible, and that’s what makes it so special. As writers, we aren’t meant to cage or corral this source of storytelling sorcery. We’re meant to honor, celebrate, and above all else, experience it. It is the experience of playful infinity that matters most, at least in the stages unshared. Exploring a faraway lifetime in the mind is one thing, but prepping and packaging it to be shared is another.

On this planet, the infinite must condense into form to be perceived. It is a fact of third-dimensional existence, I’m afraid. Once you’ve satisfied the urge to swim through your ocean of entropy, your imagination, you might want to bring something back to land. This is were story structuring tools come in handy.

Structuring seldom comes naturally to me. That is why, after completing my undergraduate degree in three different forms of storytelling, I returned to academia to zoom in on creative writing. My professors have unleashed a great deal of wisdom, and I’ve spoken about it a few times here on Medium. They’ve offered actionable formulas as means of making the maelstrom more manageable. However, in this article, I’d like to share my secret to the most vital part of any story’s journey toward being shared, because in order for a story to be shared, it must first be written.

I begin every story with a chaotic narrative monstrosity I have affectionately dubbed The Crack Draft. The moniker is intentional and layered, something of an iceberg. At the top, it refers to the adjective “cracked”, which informally can mean, “crazy; insane”. The intention behind The Crack Draft is to allow the most unhinged version of the story to manifest from chaos. It isn’t meant to be read, let alone understood.

This is the draft where all those disjointed, viscerally exciting scenes get to blossom freely. Muses don’t take kindly to limitations. They must feel free to manifest as largely, explosively, and unapologetically as possible. The Crack Draft, in all of its insanity, is a safe space for that.

The “Crack” in the name also refers to a state of fractured-ness. It’s like cracked glass. Beautiful and shimmering in all of its shards, it doesn’t need to be a perfect panel into another reality yet. It’s like a window pane into the world of the story, currently shattered against hardwood. It will eventually be reassembled, but for now, it’s a spectacle of messy sharpness in and of itself. Each little shard is a moment, a character, a worldbuilding detail, a feeling.

Finally, the “Crack” refers to the slang term “cracked out”, which means “excessively high”. During this stage of drafting, I want the story to feel like an addictive substance. I want to get high on the moments, and ride that high to the edge of my imagination’s horizon. If I’m not soaring above my writing desk during each session, I’m doing something wrong. This isn’t the time for stress, anxiety, imposter syndrome, perfectionism, or any of the other infections that ravage creativity. This is fun, pure madness, a drug trip where the drug is pure creative freedom. Pure childlike wonder. Pure imaginative essence.

I always begin with The Crack Draft, because if I didn’t, I don’t think I’d ever want to write at all.

For me, I believe The Crack Draft is effective for a few reasons. Firstly, it actively removes all stakes, because stakes scare creativity away. If, whilst writing something, I badger myself with notions of perception or visions of grandeur, I’ll terrify myself away from the keyboard. It isn’t productive for me to consider how others will regard my work, even if that regard sways positive. If I get caught in up how much my story will be loved or hated by someone other than me, writer’s block hits like a freight train.

The Crack Draft is purposefully designed for me and me only. I am the experiencer. I am the author and the target audience. I approach with zero intention for any of The Crack Draft’s contents to be made public, but ironically, it’s within The Crack Draft that I typically produce my best work. More of it than anticipated always ends up in the incarnation intended for others to see.

If I get too lost in my head about this, or if any semblance of perfectionism crops up, another element of The Crack Draft comes in handy. It isn’t The Almighty Draft One, far from it. It’s The Crack Draft. It’s supposed to be cracked. It’s supposed to be, in some way or another, bad. I disarm my own perfectionist habits by giving them a new job: make a perfectly terrible thing. The worse it is, the better. Write a scene that makes no sense. Have a character act out of character. Throw in a blatant plot hole to be figured out later. Do something stupid. Stupidly fun. Perfectly, stupidly, fun.

I start and finish all of my stories because I allow them the chance to be messy before they find order. I allow the musings, the muses, of my imagination to flourish in a cloud of untethered, undiluted imperfection. If I attempt to cage them, they’ll fly away. This is a space where the inner child must run free. The inner adult can come online to work out the logistics later.

Harmony and order are birthed from chaos and entropy, never the other way around. Just as cities are secondary to nature, plots are secondary to stories. Stories are free, infinite, and incomprehensible. They are filled to the brim with endless possibility. They are carefree, aware that nothing matters, because everything is possible. Plots are condensed and rigid. They are where timelines are solidified, choices anchored and permanent, stakes high as the sky.

Before you can burden yourself with the task of plotting, you must enjoy the chaos of experiencing the limitless breadth of the infinite story.