Mike asked Patrick Swenson:

What strategies do you use when writing to leave yourself openings so an idea goes from, say, a "short story" idea to enough ideas for a full book or series of books? I tend to write excitedly about the initial idea or ideas that come to me and then not know where to end what I write, or the endings I do come up with are lackluster. How does one fix those particular issues?

Patrick Swenson I'm sorry to say I've not been much of a short story writer. I've sold a handful over the years, before I started concentrating on novels. One story looks promising for expanding into a novel some day, and that was written years ago. Certainly I wasn't thinking of any strategy at the time for novelizing it. I know a few writer friends who based their first and second novels on short stories they had published earlier. In some cases, the short story became the first few chapters, except for maybe the final climax and resolution, and they went from there.

I have a vague idea and start writing and see where it goes, hoping I figure out how it will end. Currently I'm 3/4 of the way through book two (at least normal word count-wise for me) and I still don't know the ending. I'm hoping I won't have to do as one writer I know did, which was to throw out her first 45,000 words she'd written and start over!

Even while writing book one, since the book had to stand alone for my publisher, I had to take out the more overt hooks to a larger story arc and make those connections more subtle. Trust the subconscious of the reader to make those leaps.

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