It Started Small

There’s been a weird shift in my writing lately.

For the longest time, I’ve mostly written small things. Blog posts. Tiny stories. Random scenes that showed up in my head at 11:30 at night and refused to leave me alone until I got them onto a page. Little snapshots of people’s lives. Sometimes they turned into something complete. Sometimes they just existed for a while, quietly wandering off into the graveyard of unfinished ideas, living in my documents folder.

Honestly, I got comfortable writing that way.

Short stuff feels safe. You can sit down, write 800 words about a strange interaction, a funny memory, or a character standing in the rain thinking about life, and then call it a day. There’s less pressure. Less commitment. You don’t have to figure out where everything is going.

But sometime this week, something changed.

An idea popped into my head, small at first. Just a scene, really. One moment. One character. The usual kind of thing.

Except this one didn’t stop.

It started with one page – as things do. But then one page turned into three. Those three turned into eight. And then, before I fully understood what I was doing, I looked down and realized I had sixteen pages written. Actual pages. Characters with personalities. Plot lines. Problems. Connections. Notes everywhere. Questions I wanted answers to. Moments that I was excited to write next.

And the strangest part?

I think it’s actually good. It felt good.

Or, at the very least, good enough that I feel drawn toward it in a way I haven’t felt before. I keep thinking about it while doing completely unrelated things. I’ll be making coffee or trying to fold laundry, and suddenly my brain goes, “Hey, what if that character did this instead?”

Which is honestly a little annoying, but probably a good sign.

The bigger surprise, though, is the genre.

Without giving too much away, because this thing is still very much in the “fragile newborn deer trying to stand up properly” phase, I somehow wandered into writing something I never expected to write. If you had asked me even a month ago what kind of story I’d eventually attempt, I don’t think this genre would’ve even made the list.

And yet here we are.

It’s funny how that happens sometimes. You spend years thinking you know the kinds of stories you want to tell, then one random idea kicks open a door you weren’t planning to walk through.

So right now, that’s where I’m at.

I’m still figuring it all out. Still early. Still resisting the urge to talk about it too much before I know what it actually becomes. But for the first time in a while, I feel like I’m building something instead of just visiting it briefly.

That’s exciting.

Terrifying, too. But mostly exciting.

So for now, I’m just going to keep going and write it while the excitement is there.

We’ll see what it becomes.