So I’ve been doing more and more “real” writing lately – and by “real” I mean fiction. Woohoo, she said! And I’ve started noticing something odd. Ideas that I think are fairly limited and/or well-defined and therefore going to turn out to be short/very short stories (think 750 – 2000 words, max) keep morphing into long things (running thousands of words of set-up/backstory). Things that I thought were going to be very long and involved with tremendous detail, background, and character development – in short, novel/whole book ideas – why they keep turning into short stories. It’s very weird to me.

I alternate between being very upset at this and thinking it is a Very Cool Thing.

On one hand, it freaks me out and makes me think that I don’t know anything about my own ideas. I mean, if even I can’t tell if something is a Big Idea or a Small Idea – and they’re MY ideas – how on earth is anyone else supposed to know what to make of them? Shouldn’t I understand my own thought processes, my own writing style? Shouldn’t I know where I’m going? If not me, then who?
Continue reading On “Real” Writing and the Shifting Nature of Ideas