When is a story not a story?

Today I’ve been working through the very long list of written work I’ve created over the years. I asked Claude Code Terminal to scan both my cloud system and my laptop to find all the work I have ever written and compile it so I could take stock of what I have. It took a bit of time and yielded a long, messy list of files. Many of which were duplicates.

Oh, come on, we all do it. I wrote draft 1. But then I made some changes, so it was called version 2. But then I changed the end entirely and called it version 2b. So then there was the Final Draft… but, oh, it needed an edit. Then I wasn’t sure which one I had last saved before I looked for all the “thats” and the “thens” and any sneaky adverbs that might have slipped in. So saved it as Final_draft_Edited. But, what if the draft before sounded better, before I made the changes… Maybe I should just make sure and call that one the Final FINAL Draft. You get the picture. I wrote about how I eventually got a handle on all of this in my blog post ‘How I Track My Writing (And Why You Should Too)’

I was working through the list, trying to disentangle and see what I had. I found work I’d started to write and then abandoned. One such story stuck with me. Well, when I say “story”, I hadn’t written much. Just short of 200 words about a character. I did wonder if this was a pattern. I do often seem to start with “character”. 

 I recall originally writing it as an idea for a Reedsy prompt competition, but then I pivoted to an entirely different idea. So this old Scrivener file had just sat there, forgotten and neglected, for months. Until today. I read what I had written, and the penny dropped. This was too good to leave, just to be forgotten again. I could not shake the feeling that these two characters could be combined in a single story.

When Two Becomes One

So, I decided to pull that story into my gold-themed one, and now I have two major, strong characters mashed together into the same world. I did not look at how these two characters were different. Instead, I pondered what connections there might be between them. How could these two meet, and what might their relationship be? I can see how some might have looked at these two people and wondered, if there are two strong characters there, couldn’t they be two different stories instead?

I could have just left it there. Closed the scrivener file for my old story down and got back to the new one. But I was also curious what might happen if I were to mash those two stories together and see what happens. So I did. I think that it is worth the risk. Some of my riskiest risks have led to good stories. After all, The Weave felt completely implausible when I first started to write it. I like a challenge, and it paid off.

Will that work this time? Who knows, but it will be interesting trying to find out. By the end of this gold-themed series, hopefully I will know the answer.