A Writer's Notebook, Day One-Thousand-Two-Hundred-And-Twenty-Seven

I want to challenge myself to write more fiction, but I don't know how I can structure that challenge to make it effective.  I've tried to have the goal of working on a story every day before, as I do with poetry, but that doesn't work as well for me with fiction.  Several times, I have found that I get lost in the writing, attempting to keep going but not certain what to do.  With poetry, I have a lot more flexibility as a writer.  I am not as experienced in fiction, and that can result in losing my way.  I am certain that I can find a way to structure a daily fiction task for myself that is not as open ended and which will help me to develop a more robust capacity as a writer in that area.  I know I can always write a poem.  I want to feel that I can write fiction the same way, and that means practicing to develop the associated skill set.  I need to find the right way to structure it, I think, so that I know what I feel I know what I am doing.  I suppose that is the biggest thing with poetry.  I often feel free to write it even when I don't have any idea what I want to write about, because I have made myself do that so many times.  I don't feel that way about writing stories at this point, and I find it hard to imagine that same possibility, but I suspect that is more because I don't yet understand enough about what a story really is so I am not yet certain how to organize those same kind of random ideas into something that would be recognizable as a piece of fiction. 

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