Letting Ideas Go.

Writers are often asked, "Where do you get your ideas?"

My answer:  that's how you know you're a writer; you can't stop the ideas. You have to write them down or it will depress you. Why? I don't really know. My guess is it's because your curiosity is then never satisfied, or that you never get to know the character you had in mind.

Unfortunately, those ideas usually come out like a puzzle with half the pieces missing, or (even worse) Swiss cheese. You've got to create the story, rewrite it and edit it to make it worthwhile. Your principal challenges are to put the ideas into words, and to fill in what's missing. 

I have this short story I'm writing, and I planned on finishing it in 5,000 words. As I've been outlining it by a modified form of the Randy Ingermanson's Snowflake Method, I realized halfway through that the story was becoming a novel. That's not where I want to go with this. (I must mention that Ingermanson developed the Snowflake specifically for writing novels. I did say I've modified it. I'll write more about the method in the future.)

This means I must go through and eliminate characters and plot elements. At least I'm culling it before I actually write the story, which in theory is faster, or perhaps saves you a lot of trouble. I know the story's there, I just have to figure out what is most important about it.

I didn't do anything like that in my fanfic novel, Ginger Snaps: The Feral Bond. No, I went with whatever idea excited me. As a result, the plot takes some strange turns, and has a lot of weird details. For example, werewolves have a super-human sense of smell, and they will try to form packs. So, how are the packs organized? By smell, of course. A werewolf is subordinate to the one that infected him, and in fact, feel a obligatory compulsion to follow their sires'. This dominance is communicated to their brains directly by smell.

There are a whole bunch of details like this. However, now that I'm on the last chapter of GSTFB, I'm now confident of coming up with ideas, and now I have to be concerned about telling a story as efficiently as possible. So, I'm not so desperate to hold on to all the ideas I get.

However, I don't actually throw them away, either. I could always recycle them into another story.