A Writer's Notebook, Two-Thousand-And-Ninety-Nine

I mentioned previously that one of the tricks I often use when I am trying to come up with an idea for a story is to just think of some sort of excuse for why I didn't write it in the first place.  This idea often leads me to think of something that just becomes a story that doesn't relate at all to the original prompt.  I don't need it to be about my being interrupted or distracted or otherwise prevented from writing a story for the concept to work.  At the same time, I do come up with ideas for stories that work best rooted in that specific situation, and it can feel a bit strange or frustrating to be writing another story with that same exact setup again.  That is one response, and I think that, for me, the real key to it is more in the sense that I feel like I can't have all these stories in my portfolio that are so similar.  However, I found a way to reframe this by considering it from a different perspective that makes it feel far more positive and reasonable, and that is to consider that these pieces are kind of interconnected short stories leading to a collection of pieces all of which are about stories I never wrote and why I didn't write them.

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