IWSG: How to Decide Which Fiction Story to Write

It's the first Wednesday of the month and so it’s time for another Insecure Writer’s Support Group (IWSG) post! In an IWSG post, we writers bring our writing challenges and problems out into the open to share with each other and try to offer solutions. The IWSG question of the month is: Have you ever been conflicted about writing a story or adding a scene to a story? How did you decide to write it or not? My problem has mostly been the former situation. I’ve been conflicted over what story to write more than I have over adding a scene. 

The best way to explain how I deal with this problem is to show you my procedure of selecting an idea for a story. I often jot down story ideas in my journal or type them in my phone’s note app as they come to me. When I’m ready to write a new work of fiction I'll go through my journals or note app and look over the story ideas I’ve accumulated through time. Unless there’s an idea that I’m already burning over to make into a full story, I'll select three or more ideas and compile them into a list. Then I'll look over this list and decide which idea I'm most in the mood for developing into a story. 

Many times I’ll feel conflicted over which idea to write the story from. This is usually due to myself being equally enthused about two or more of them. In this case, I'll brainstorm on each idea from the list and that will give me a feel for which one I'm going to be most motivated to write. This works better for me than brainstorming for an idea at the time I’m ready to write a story. When I would try doing it that way, I wouldn’t feel as enthused about writing the story. The idea would seem too cheap in that when I would develop it into the story I would feel like I was doing so only because there was nothing else to write about. When I would feel like that, the story would come out very shallow and not go anywhere interesting. But when I work from an idea that I had written down ahead of time, I feel like I’m writing something that was meant for me to write.

Do you make a list of story ideas for future writing or do you just write your story spare of the moment when the idea comes to you? Today’s IWSG is brought to you by these super co-hosts: Janet Alcorn, Pat Garcia, Natalie Aguirre, and Shannon Lawrence! IWSG was founded by awesome author Alex Cavanaugh, writer of the Cassa Series of novels! 

Until next time . . .