Okay, I’m going to come out and admit I have a Problem.
It’s a Writing Problem. See, writing long (over 6K words or so) is a BITCH for me—such that it becomes so stressful that it’s often ceases to be enjoyable. A fic with chapters becomes an obligation rather than a hobby.
I keep trying anyway, because sometimes it’s worth it, and we don’t get better if we don’t try. I have a certain number of slots available in my brain for long-ass stories; a number of WIPs I can tolerate to committing to at any given time before I break down under writing guilt and seize up completely.
But the Problem is that my Long-Ass Story Quota is currently full, and yet I seem unable, recently, to conceive any story ideas that are short and thus actually writable.
I know that somehow, I am MAKING these story ideas long. I find a story kernel I like, and abruptly I find so much stuff grafted onto it that if I wrote it, it’d be a novel. The plots that grab my attention and make me want to write them are complex and extended, and my mind immediately wants to delve into all the nuances of theme and character, which takes up a lot of space. Which, seeing as my Long-Ass Story Quota is full, is never actually going to happen. Or else it will end up with me posting, like, maybe three chapters of some cool new WIP, which I will then bog down on and never complete.
So, um, does anybody else have this problem? Know how to deal with it? Have any suggestions? Should I go ahead and post WIPs I know I’ll never finish? Because I need some interesting not-long stories to write, here. This has been driving me batty.