"What is an Inchoate?"
Not yet fully formed or developed.
Unleashing the Potential: Achieving Full Form Through Craft
For a writer, the concept of inchoate can be both overwhelming and inspiring. The blank page, the blinking cursor, the endless swirl of ideas: all of these have the potential for greatness, but also for failure.
It is in the crafting of language that the inchoate becomes fully formed. Through careful attention to grammar, syntax, and etymology, a writer can mold raw material into a polished work of art.
But this process extends beyond the basics of language. The ability to delve deeply into character and plot, to explore the nooks and crannies of dialogue and setting, is what separates the inchoate from the fully realized.
So do not fear the inchoate. Instead, embrace it as the raw potential that it is, and unleash that potential through the careful craft of storytelling.
Like a seed that grows into a tree, inchoate ideas can develop into fully-realized works of literature. Here are two examples of inchoate material becoming literary classics.
Considered one of the most important poems of the 20th century, Eliot wrote that The Waste Land was 'the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life.'1
Those insignificant feelings were shaped into a long, complex narrative of personal and cultural fragmentation set during the aftermath of World War I. The poem's intricate web of literary references and allusions, its fragmented structure and its shifting voices all work together illustrating Eliot’s ideas of disillusionment and human condition.
In Woolf’s own diary, she wrote of her idea for what would become Mrs. Dalloway: 'I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticize the social system, and show it at work...'
The book's plot is simple enough: a day in the life of society woman Clarissa Dalloway, who is preparing for a party. But the psychological depth of the characters and Woolf’s unorthodox use of stream-of-consciousness narration give voice to the internal struggles that come to define character’s lives. It is through these internal musings that Woolf creates an in-depth critique of 1920s London society, working class rights, queer subculture, and mental illness.