A few days ago I finished a draft of a story for my writers group to chew on. Well, finish is not the right choice of words because I left it unfinished. The reason? I did not know how it ended.
The group threw around ideas after finishing the critiques and as often happens in this situation, none of them stuck. But, a combination of other people’s ideas generated the correct ending in my own head, and it’s an ending I’m excited about.
Unfortunately, the draft I submitted to the group turned out to be not quite the proper way to tell the tale. It was rough, what Orson Scott Card likes to call an exploratory draft. An exploratory draft is when you have an idea that you don’t quite know what to do with and you just start writing anyway. You are exploring the concept.
Exploratory drafts are often very rough, often the words come out only with great difficulty. Sometime the result is a decent story, sometimes you scrap the story and start over. That’s what I did in this case.
By starting over, I was able to fix somethings that would have been like surgical removal of cystic fibrosis in the old draft. Sometimes things are so ingrained that you simply can’t change them without starting over, so redrafting the idea lets you make those changes.
I also decided that the original draft started too early. That is frequently a problem with an exploratory draft. You don’t have a firm idea of what the story really is, so you don’t know the correct point in the timeline to start the story. Sometimes an explorat0ry draft begins way too early, on rarer occasions it starts after the story began. These are things you come to recognize as the exploratory draft takes shape.
I’m nearly 1000 words into the new draft, written largely in fits and starts. But it feels a lot better than the original. I don’t know what other writers feel, but when I am putting something decent together, the writing becomes freer, it flows more easily, but most important, it just feels right. It has a certain je ne sais quoi that can’t really be put into words, even by a writer. I suppose that’s why they use a French phrase that literally translates to I don’t know what.