Does anybody else have this problem where you try to write a story and it quickly spirals into something you didn’t intend for it to be? It can be kinda fun, but I find it really annoying most of the time. Often I just want to write something relatively simple, but then there’s a plot hole that requires a lot of covering up, or the story takes a turn that only makes sense in a much larger context, or I realize there’s a ton of potential in something that the story shouldn’t be focusing on and I just can’t help myself. The small details become larger and larger parts of the plot, and suddenly I’ve got thousands of words that amount to nothing because I didn’t tell the story I wanted to.

I’ve been trying to remedy this issue, and I think the key might just be to let some of the plot holes go. Not the big ones, obviously, but I often get caught up in little details that spiral out of control. For example, I was trying to write a short story about a man in the distant future whose dying spouse made him promise to go visit Earth, a planet he’s never been to. He put off the request for years due to some emotional baggage, until one day he sees a headline that says Earth is being cordoned off because the Sun is expanding much, much sooner than anybody could have anticipated. He then has to drop everything and go see Earth before it’s gone. The point was supposed to be that he learns some lessons about life along the way, journey before destination, that sort of thing.

Along the way though, I got caught up in some details about the technology being used in the story. Originally my idea was that the main character preferred to travel by sending his mind over the galactic internet to a new body, while his wife preferred to travel in her own body the old fashioned way. They had serious disagreements about this when she was alive. He would discover the reason why she preferred to travel that way during the course of his journey that he promised he would take in his own body, culminating in his arrival at Earth where it all finally made sense to him. Then I realized the technology was probably applicable for a lot more stuff, got distracted coming up with a bunch of robot body ideas, then AI somehow got involved on the back of what was originally just a throwaway joke, and the whole point of the story got lost in a mountain of sci-fi mumbo jumbo that nobody in their right mind would care to read. I spent like two months writing this. I’m afraid to read it back because it’s probably so painfully bad that I’ll just give up entirely. I’d really like to do a rewrite, but I’m afraid I’ll get lost in the details again and have another crappy version of a story that I know could be really great if I just focused on what I wanted it to say originally. I know I’ll just have to let the remote body technology be underutilized for no good reason, and let the AI joke stay just a joke, and do all the things my brain hates doing if I want it to be any good. Why’s it so hard to write what I intend to write?

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley