One of the things I’ve found myself doing lately (mainly because I struggle to write sequels–but that’s another post) is that I’ll write a story and then come back and write the story that happened before it (decades, centuries prior!).
I might even just focus on a small detail like the broken-down truck in a driveway. How did it get to that state?
What this allows me to do is similar to having an ending to my story before I start, in that I know what will happen. But it’s different in that it is a different story–likely even a different tone or genre.
And this informs that story that I already wrote, so that when I go back to edit the first story, I have new details, new threads to weave into the existing story. It becomes a conversation between the two tales that allows the change for additional depth I likely had not considered when I wrote the first story.
Even if one of the stories ends up not being up to par, you’ve accomplished a different way of improving the other story by having the knowledge of one of those stories to help flesh out the other.
WELCOME TO THE JIREVERSE 