Locating The Energy In Your Abandoned Drafts To Revive Or Reuse Them

May 24, 2024

man holding incandescent bulb — Photo by Riccardo Annandale on Unsplash

The weekly online writing group I host/lead is a fun gig, a relaxed hybrid between a social writing meet-up and a workshop of writing exercises, analysing stories and general chat. It’s always a source of inspiration and this week, as we talked, I was reminded of an idea I’ve kicked around for a while. It’s about the importance of finding where the energy is located in your story idea, and how this really helps if, like me, you have a folder lurking somewhere that contains the beginnings of abandoned stories.

We didn’t mean to abandon them. At the time of writing, we sensed there was something worth developing in them. We fully intended to return to nurture them through to maturity, to ruffle their hair, tweak their cheeks and send them, bright-eyed and full of wonder, out into the world.

But sometimes stories go cold on us, or we put them aside for so long that other things got in the way, like life and death and taxes, and (let’s be honest), new ideas we felt would work more easily. The abandoned drafts now sit in that folder or drawer or notebook, responding frostily to any attempts at détente.

It feels wasteful, right? But by searching for the energy, the emotional or narrative trigger in those drafts, we can reignite them. I should preface this with a caveat - you won’t succeed with all of them. Some unfinished stories are like houseplants you can’t quite revive – at best they can chopped up to provide fertiliser for future writing.

But you will be able to rekindle some of them. A couple of the stories in my collection, All That Is Between Us, are ones I resuscitated, because they fit the overarching theme of the book, about the complex fragility of human relationships.

One of these, The King of Throwaway Island, amounted to little more than a half-written idea about two shipwrecked people trying to repair their damaged relationship after being washed onto a floating island of plastic waste. This quirky story outline had been abandoned in a folder marked Maybe, Sometime.

The reason I was able to rewrite the story was through the way I approached the original text. I didn’t look at it analytically, at least not initially. I didn’t read through it and try to sort out the structure, or fiddle with the pace or put more narrative drive into it.

No, what I did before anything else was find an energy point, the thing that aroused my curiosity and compelled me to write the story in the first place. In other words, I didn’t start looking at the story with the eyes of an editor, but with the eyes of a writer searching for inspiration. Once I had re-established that emotional connection, the story began to warm up again. It started to become more malleable, the way forward became clearer. The finished, published version kept the floating island and the relationship, but changed everything else quite drastically.

When I talk about the energy point, or emotional trigger, I don’t mean a big dramatic event. Instead, I mean some element within a story idea or some aspect of the writing that gives you the enthusiasm to tell the story and get into your flow, without overly worrying about the outcome (because we can always deepen and strengthen a story in the development and editing stages).

Try these tips in your writing practice to locate the key that will unlock the energy in a piece of writing, or in yourself, to be able to focus on pushing into a story idea and seeing where it goes.

The ‘real’ starting point

Finding the most apt point in time and place at which to start a story will help energise you to continue. Anton Chekhov said: ‘Start late.’ Which I interpret as ‘start later than you think’. It is surprising the number of stories that can be improved simply by deleting the first paragraph or scene because they lack energy and vitality. They are a drag the story doesn’t need.

Distinctive details

Distinctive details are the lifeblood of good writing. They create surprise, they evoke tone and mood, they locate the reader in a time and place that adds resonance, they act as a shorthand way of juicing up characterisation. Utilising sensory writing as a key element of your craft really helps with this. Think of it as making pictures or soundscapes or a scratch-and-sniff card for your story. What elements are going to be evoked through sensory writing? What quirks or flaws will make your characters more than stock? It doesn’t take much. You don’t need to drown your reader in detail, not least because you don’t have time in short fiction.

Voice

Voice is primarily about tone and mood – the emotional register of a story, for example angry, whimsical, ironic, sad, scared, informal, detached etc. I learned early on in my own writing practice that a sense of a tone or mood is a surfing wave we can ride a long way. If you can relocate that, you might be able to surf that wave again.

Language and word choice

From simple and direct to deeply lyrical, vocabulary, diction, syntax, rhythm and style are hugely important not only in establishing distinctiveness, but giving you drive to push forward with a story. I’d argue that appropriate language is not something you add in the editing stage (though it is definitely something you can enhance) but something that is a catalyst to writing a draft.

Associations and connections

Many short fictions work, much like poetry, through their associative qualities. A series of images deepens meaning – leading to great nuance and complexity. For example, George Saunders seemingly simple story Sticks does this through a crossed metal pole in a family garden. At first, the pole seems to merely be, as the story tells us, the father’s “one concession to glee,” to mark holidays and other special occasions. But when Saunders associates this image with the father’s controlling behaviour and draconian rules, the meaning of the cross becomes broader, more sinister, and then more poignant.

Complication and disruption

Life is messy. People are messy. Good stories gain their energy from an examination of the messy. So where is the complication, the struggle, the friction in your story. Maybe it’s not what you thought it was when you first wrote it.

Other works

Read something you wouldn’t normally read. To be a writer, you have to be a reader. And to be a reader, you must read from cultures or genres other than your own. I have often been able to generate impetus in writing a story by gaining energy from other written works.

In yourself

For example, if something is stuck in your writing, or you can’t locate the energy, then unstick yourself. Movement, such as walking (or cycling or whatever movement you can do) and narrative are deeply linked. They both take you from place to place. The unconscious is the hidden engine in your writing life, and you have to give it time to work out the problems that only you can solve.

Harnessing the energy in a piece of writing is not about getting it right the first time. Don’t let perfectionism get in the way of the impetus. Too much rewriting in a draft as you go along, closes off spontaneous discovery. Process first, refinement later.

Those writing gremlins that sit on our shoulders and whisper into our ears about how we are not good enough, how no-one cares much about what we write, are really bloody annoying. But in some ways they are right. The world doesn’t owe us any care or interest. However, that minor inconvenience shouldn’t stop us. Accept the fact that our craft is one in which more often than not, we feel as if we are falling short. By all means throw yourself to the floor and have an attack of the vapours. Then get up, locate the energy, and carry on.