Story Concept Vs Story Theme

When I begin a story I often have a particular image, or scene, or bit of dialogue in mind. I'm rarely sure where it goes, but I try to build a story around it just so I can get to that piece. Sometimes it is an overall concept and I'm not sure what to do with it, but I spend a lot of time trying to make the story about that scene or piece that has haunted my brain for a while.

It's taken me a long time and I'm still not sure that my creative brain fully accepts the truth of this, but it's the wrong way to go. You see when I am writing the story I am so focused on trying to meet this goal of getting the scene in my head write or the dialogue to fit, that I mistakenly believe that it's what the story is about.

It's not.

As many writers have told me and many have advised in their books on writing. You simply write a story and find out what it's about later. I have a hard time with this. There's a bit of uncertainty of leaping into the void that I don't deal with well at all. I have to have some faith that my stories going to reveal something worth reading when it's done and I doubt that all too often.

So in writing, I focus on the idea or the concept as if that were the goal, and when it doesn't meet that goal I get discouraged and will often cease writing out that particular idea. It's a problem. If I were to simply write a story, any story that I'm passionate about and then be open to the idea that it could be about something completely different I'd probably get a lot more done.

I'm still working on accepting that. I have to be willing to experiment.