When is a story not a story?

When two stories become one…

I was working through my long list of my written work, trying to disentangle and see what I had.

(I wrote about how that came about here).

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 characters into a story together and see what happens.

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 so I stuck with it. Eventually the story started to emerge organically in iterations. Which is one reason I was curious to document how the story comes together this time. This “What if” way of writing seems to work well for me.

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