When a story doesn't want to be found

Hot air balloon rising through the stor

Right now, I’m well and truly stuck with a story.

😝 I’m three quarters of the way through a first draft. It really feels uncomfortable. It isn’t working. I’m not finding it. I know the ending I want. But I haven’t earned that ending in any way. I’m writing towards the ending, but it feels very weak. The story has begun in a very different way than I expected, and I’m wondering if my beginning heads towards the ending at all. If it does, it seems like a long journey. I want to stop. Because it feels so uncomfortable, I lose trust in myself, I’m not enjoying it. I want to walk away.

✏ A character finds half a pencil...why!? Who is the guy outside the shop and why is he there? This woman is traumatised...why? And how is she ever going to get from where she is to where he is...?

🧲 The words keep coming, but the story’s not coalescing. There is no magnetism in the story, the themes are not emerging from the fog. More and more words but no real sense or meaning. My critical voice is stronger and stronger.

I find myself asking a load of sensible questions about the story –

• Is the beginning earning that ending, why not?

• Is the ending right for this story? What could a different ending be? Why is that better?

• Are my characters doing what they’re want to do, going where they want to go?

• Have I laid the groundwork for the themes to emerge?

• Are the metaphors leading anywhere?

• Have I left enough space, enough air or the story to breath.

• Why does it feel like the characters are wading through treacle to get to where I want them to be.

And the answer right now is: I don’t know. Not yet.

👎🏼 This draft isn’t ready to be judged. It’s not ready to submit to my curiosity. It’s not ready to be understood.

💔 Some of my clients talk about abandoning stories when they hit this point—ripping them up entirely. To me, that’s sad. Because they haven’t persevered long enough to find what the story really is.

Often for me this means keeping in an unconscious place for longer. Letting images and incidents flow up without attributing meaning to them.

😭 I need to finish my clunky, weird, disassociated, anti-meaning draft before I can go on. And this is very uncomfortable. I feel like a bad writer.

Why I Keep Going

🗑️ Because finishing a flawed draft is part of my process. I keep going. Even when I hate it. Even when it feels wrong. Even when I want to throw it in the bin and head off to do something more sensible and meaningful with my time and my life...

🌙 Once I’ve got my messy, muddy unconscious draft done, I can look at it properly. It’s like someone I met drunk in a club at 2am, stay in the night for a bit longer, morning will come as it always does.

✄ The concision process is exciting. The trimming of the fat, the removal of the extraneous. Chucking the sandbags out of a hot air balloon to make it glide upwards.

☠️ It’s in the taking away that I begin to find the power in the threshold moments, the hidden magnetic pull, the actual meaning. I will find why that found pencil is there, and if I don’t it will go. I can pull the sticky, clinging flesh off the body, to reveal the bones, the skeleton, the structure.

😉The story will start to fly, start to zing, it will join up in unexpected and pleasing ways. The characters will give me a wink, like they knew all along it would be this.

So I've taken words away to find meaning. Scraping the earth away from the pot.

🪄In my story Mystic Master Salvador (Cork short story festival) I was writing about a dime-store magician from the perspective of a young boy in the audience. The magician actually made young boys disappear at the end of the act. I didn’t know how I would pull this off, or why I was so convinced that they had to disappear. As I went through my process and persevered, I found out that they did not physically disappear, only emotionally, and they were changed forever...

This Is My Process. What’s Yours?

I’m not a planner. I don’t map every beat in advance. I write toward a sense of meaning, knowing the story will reveal itself in layers—usually not until much later.

But that’s what my process demands of me. I’m curious: what does your process demand of you?

What do you do when the story won’t behave? When your draft disappoints you? When you’re deep in the mess and meaning feels far away?

I’d love to know. Drop a comment, or if you're curious about how coaching can support you in moments like these, take a look at tomharveycoaching.co.uk. where you can access more resources and join my email list. Or just click on the Enquiries page.

😈 How do you navigate out of the hell of a first draft?