I’m writing a short story set in a world I’ve played with for years. It seemed a good story with relatable characters. I started. Part of it made sense to me; I know the back story. The average reader wouldn’t know that, so it needed detail. Now there’s this other thing, and another thing, and so on. The short story is no longer short.
This happens often. It is difficult for me to crank out a short story, despite my inherent laziness. Instead, my brain builds elaborate histories for everything. I see economic systems, language shifts, religious development. Even the tiniest vignette has an encyclopedia of facts around it.
One option: simply make notes elsewhere and leave them out of the story. In some cases, that works. My brain doesn’t like it. There will be some detail from the story world that makes the story just that much better, and the rest of the world comes with it. Sure, oatmeal is good, but how about with cinnamon? How about with cinnamon and honey and blueberries and cream and…
Occasionally, the needed pieces are just things not originally conceived. If the main character does this action, will there be a reaction? Consider a kid who not only stands up to the bully, but hurts the bully in the process. Is that the end of the story? Are there witnesses or authority figures? Does the bully have friends? Despite what some parents tell their kids, many bullies won’t stop because you stood up to them, and if you hurt that bully, you better have crippled them or they are coming after you. So a short story about a kid standing up to a bully is likely to grow into a longer story about that kid running from the butt-kicking of a lifetime.
In the short story I was working on, there was a similar scenario where the weaker party was trying to escape from a stronger group. Without giving away too much, the stronger group is sent packing with the message that they better not come back. That seems straightforward.
The problem is, there was already a context for the stronger group. They were a tiny arm of a much larger group. The much larger group would be unlikely to accept the threat, choosing instead to retaliate.
This apparent antagonist was not intended to be the primary antagonist of the story. They were supposed to be a passing part of the set up and then fade away. This was one of those situations where the character tells you what they are going to do despite the prepared plot. The temporary bad guy went home and got buddies, making the story longer and more complex in the doing.
This won’t be bad for the tale. The planned antagonist will now have some competition, and this only aids the protagonist. Before this, I wasn’t entirely sure how my protagonist was going to pull off the miracle of getting away from the planned bad guy, but now the villain has something more hostile to deal with.
When I get around to retirement, I will have to get all of the stories for this fictional world out of my head. In some cases, it will just be a matter of finishing off the started-not-finished pieces from the past decades. In others, I may do a paper on the economic systems of this world and their effect on the interactions between the various peoples and their prejudices. For now, I will still try to write things as small as I possibly can. Maybe I can keep each short story to just a couple of volumes.