Or show depending on who you ask. At any rate, I have a lot of stories inside that need to get out on the page. This topic comes up as you get closer to querying agents. “What else are you working on?” is one of the questions I’ve been preparing for. I have a very long answer. Besides the books in this series I have plotted out and partially written, I have a whole file of story ideas.
Most are fantasy and a few are science-fiction. There may be a few that deny genre in their rough state, but I have learned enough to fix that since writing out the idea. Ideas are not a problem for me, world building and character generation are kind of my jam. Keeping my butt in the chair to write out the adventures for those characters is a problem. I’m not nearly as bad as I used to be. I like to write.
Agents want to know, so I’m told, if you intend to make a career out of writing, that you have the material to make it work. Man do I have material! From my experience with other writers, I feel like I’m not the only one with too many stories and too little time to share them all. What a sad situation to be in.
When choosing the stories I write, I ask myself which ones I’m most passionate about. What scenes bubble up to the surface of my imagination unbidden? Is there enough story meat there to develop a whole novel or is this just a short story for a single character? If I can string a few more pearls together, it may be the next story I tackle.
Even if I don’t find a fully fleshed out idea for a new story, I don’t discard it entirely. I have a folder with half-formed plots, characters without a home, and scenes that might find a world to bring to life someday. My imagination isn’t linear, it comes in cycles that layer over each other to make an organic whole. That’s a lot like life in general.