Crafting A Contained Story

[MajorKerina]

Hi, I am an author and I have a problem. It’s basically the literary equivalent of feature creep. I have a bunch of stories set in various universes which could spend hundreds to thousands of pages on epic events and small personal ones too.

For the future and my sanity and my reader’s sanities, I have decided to make a plan of a short story which can’t possibly creep out of control… Maybe.

The premise is this… there is a character who has a supernatural power which enables them to make contact with spirits or ghosts, and temporarily give them a physical form again. They have a whole backstory, a whole history, and all that. But for this story I’m focusing on a jail/now museum with a menagerie of conscious spirits.

The person who runs it is a little bit psychic and was saved by one of the strongest ghosts when she was about to fall and die. Ever since, she has been searching for a way to repay that debt. This particular ghost she considers like a sibling. It has appeared as both a man and a woman, but has unresolved feelings about having been a man in life. It’s a very kindly, sweet ghost who has done remarkable things (based on a real one from a podcast I listened to). But it has such a hopeless aura. So. this is where the character with the power comes in.

The lady who runs the museum contacts the main character and asks him to help. He can only bring back a ghost for one evening, from dusk till dawn.

So he comes and resurrects this ghost as a lady of that time (the late 40s/early 50s) and… that would be the rest of the story. What happens with her over the course of one night.

Sort of spooky also heartwarming and very intentionally constricted to a finite amount of time so that I don’t go off on all sorts of tangents and make an epic of it.

I was curious, what kind of advice do you have for keeping a story from spiraling out of control? And from what I’ve described what do you think I might have to watch out for so I don’t get lost in the wilderness? Thank you.

 

[SailusGebel]

Think of an ending.

 

[hauntedwritings]

Think of an ending.

Pretty much this. So how to chose an ending?

An ending is essentially the characters (regardless if its the whole story or one of the arcs) either reaching their goals, or failing to do so. This includes the villans in a lot of hero-stories, where the hero normally puts in the final nail that stops the villan from reaching its goals.

Because the character is always working towards the goal (and the ending), it becomes easy to follow the rule 'if something isn't needed to progress the story, it should not be mentioned'.

 

[TotallyHuman]

Give yourself a word limit from both above and below and voila. You're done.
Say, no less than 3000 no more than 6000 words should be more than enough

 

[Cipiteca396]

So. this is where the character with the power comes in

Sounds like an anthology. Your character spends an episode helping a ghost, and then rides off into the sunset(rise).

Think of an ending.

This, if you want to keep it as a short story. Nothing matters except the characters and their interactions. The color of the floorboards, the reason the museum exists, the name of the city, all meaningless. Cut everything that doesn't lead to a specific plot related action.

You have three characters. You don't need to mention how they met. You can do so, in passing, but don't waste more than a line on it.

You don't need to explain a character's backstory in explicit detail. No reason to know why the ghost died. No reason to know the ghost's friend's family name or where they went to school. No reason to explain who the MC is, or why they want to help these two.

Honestly, write it like you don't know what you're doing and just pulling everything out of your ass. You know that's not what's happening, but if your readers don't accuse you of it, you failed.

The things you should be writing are only the things that trigger an emotional response in the audience. They don't even need to know why it happened. Just that it did. If the ghost freaks out and goes on a rampage, then the friend can pull a solution out of their ass. And when the MC asks why, you can choose to say a witty one liner that explains it... Or you can just say, "It's a secret."

The biggest advantage of all this... The audience will start to wonder about the world they aren't seeing. They'll be curious, and try to come up with reasons for everything. Even if they're wrong, they'll probably be just as excited to find out how and why when they read the next story.

If you want to write a long story, or an anthology like I suggested, you can keep to this formula. After all, you have all the time in your world to fill in the blanks that you're creating. Then, you can think of an ending. And to motivate you to reach it, you can also think of the beginning of the next part.

 

[K5Rakitan]

You might outline your story based on the time of day everything happens. If you want to do a contained story over a longer period of time, you can use a calendar to help yourself stay organized.

 

[LostLibrarian]

If you look at the core of a story from start to beginning, you'll most likely find a single idea there. Going from that idea, you'll often find some kind of ending you want to work towards. Try to list everything that has to happen between now and the end of your novel. It doesn't need to be totally detailed or in a specific order, but think about it as bullet points.
E.g. the MC has to see a friend die to understand the pain behind it. Or the MC has to get rejected. Or the MC has to become a parent. Or has to grow to level 95. Whatever.

With that in mind, you can take your new ideas and just answer the question: Will your new idea bring something to the table, that solves any of these problems? If not, it is something that could be either rewritten as part of another chapter/arc (if it is a longer story) or dropped alltogether. It's fluff, that doesn't add something to the core of your story. It'll probably be one of the reasons people complain about pacing or filler.

If you don't have an ending in mind, it can be a bit harsher, because you won't have these bullet points. But you can still think about what the central theme/atmosphere of your story is. Will the idea further that development? Try to find a place for it. Is the idea cool but doesn't add anything? Write it down somewhere else. A lot can also be re-used later, merged to another new idea, or even used in a different story...