I always get stuck on the dumbest things when I’m writing short stories. Thing is, the tiniest details are important to me; in a story of only 2000 or so words, the smallest thing can tell you loads about a person. Like, take the main character I have right now, who has been just impossible. At first he was an accomplished ukulele player, but then I thought that was off because he’s not a happy type of person and that’s a happy instrument. I had to cut the lucha libre classes, because they just seemed little bit off, but then you have all this fictional time in a person’s life that they have to fill. He now rolls his own cigars, but then I’m wondering where he would’ve learned that.

Ugh. Now I have to change his profession to construction worker because later in the story he has to have the skills to build an igloo, but he also has a fear of heights due to the incident with the condor when he was seven, so it’s not like you’d find him on top of mobile scaffolding. Unless the condor returned and that’s where they had their dramatic confrontation! Alright, so that’s the ending sorted, or at least the climax. This way he gets up on the scaffolding by means not his own, turning it into a final stage that teaches my character to cope with his fears. And now I don’t have to make him a construction worker…though there is the issue of the igloo. I suppose he could work in the office of a construction company, thus learning to set up aluminium work platforms from a distance, which could ostensibly be used to create an igloo.

Wait, do I need the igloo part in the story? I don’t have many words to work with, so I don’t want to take up quite so much space with an extended dream sequence. So I’ll work in maybe a line about how he took an aluminium work platform building course at school, delete the igloo dream scene, strengthen his personal relationship with the condor and…well, he needs a name. We’ll go with ‘Al’ as a placeholder.

-W.R.