After finishing my second novella, an expansion from the 10,00 word novelette, I'm wondering. Does a story ever evolve beyond what you intended?
Like for me my Nmyphs Of Winter Fire was going to be a 16,000 word chapter book. But then ended up expanding into 20,000 words. I got the ending I wanted of course (I write Hardian tragedies regarding the mood), but I may need to look at it again to see what's bloating it.
Then Song Of Lost Youth, ended up incompassing two chapter books (each 10,000 words), that ends up becoming a YA for reluctant readers. And now I'm wondering if the dystopia is not dystopian enough, and the I'm not banging anyone over the head enough with the SF elements.
Edit: Actually paired it down to a long novelette. If I had kept the final 5,000 words I would have been left with the MC surviving a sky scraper fall with very little consequence other than a painfull arm. I prefer that he's left completely insane.
My second book was supposed to be a novella. It somehow blew up to over 150,000 words.
I sat down a couple weeks ago to write a story that I anticipated to be about novella-length (25,000-30,000 words). Even that I saw as a lofty goal, and would have been okay with a novelette. It takes place over four days, and at this point in writing it, I'm at 12,000 words and not even at the end of the first day in the story.
I find that I think of stories in skeletal form, but as I write, the real meat of the content just sort of flows out. I find more interesting things that I feel should go in there. I'm always surprised when I begin to write a planned short scene and it comes out to like, 3 or 4 thousand words. And then when I go back over it (expecting a lot of fluff), I'm pleasantly surprised at just how much there is to use.
Do you serialize a lot of stuff on there?