Not Going As Planned / Happenings In The Outhouse 10-Jan-2025

You can plan and plan and plan all you want, and when it comes to doing something, always expect something to not go as planned.  Expect the unexpected, as the old adage says.

I've written a fair amount of stories.  And even if I do some outlining (which is usually minimal at best since I typically write into the dark with no plan in mind), something unexpected crops up which takes my story into another direction that I hadn't planned.

This past fall, my wife and I hired a contractor to help do some remodeling in our house.  New flooring, windows, doors.  Every step along the way the contractor has hit a roadblock or two--nothing being his fault, since he is at the mercy of the window/door manufacturers or the lumberyard in question.  Even the original patio door was two feet wider--yes, I said two feet!--than the old one.  The contractor measured it correctly.  Again, when it was ordered, it was ordered incorrectly.

One of the stories I had just submitted to Writers of the Future at the end of December was like this.  I had something in mind for how it would go, but suddenly as I wrote a scene early on, the story took a turn in another direction.  In my opinion, the story is much better than what I had anticipated.