Why Embracing Chaos Might Be the Secret Ingredient to Your Best Writing Yet
Ever notice how stories in your head often feel like wild firecrackers exploding all at once—brilliant flashes, scattered sparks, and no obvious way to harness any of it into something neat and shareable? Yeah, me too. That maddening jumble of scenes, half-baked characters, and elusive climaxes can swirl around like a creative cyclone, thrillingly chaotic yet frustratingly untamed. Here’s a kicker: what if embracing that chaos—rather than fighting it—could actually be the secret sauce to not just starting, but finishing your stories? In this piece, I’m pulling back the curtain on my personal wild card, a scrappy secret I call “The Crack Draft.” It’s a gloriously messy first draft that feels a bit cracked (insane, maybe?), but it’s exactly what breaks the story open and sets it roaring to life. If you’ve ever struggled to channel your imagination’s wild riffs into a concrete tale, welcome to the remedy you didn’t know you needed. Ready to dive into the beautiful madness? LEARN MORE.
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…
