: Re: How to decide whether a story is worth writing? Sometimes I have inspiration for a story. In random pieces of spare time I daydream more and more details until I am satisfied with the concept

@Shanna875

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First, good stories tend to keep pestering you until you put it down in words. Bad stories seem blessed with inertia.

Second, I read a great book by Nanci Atwell about how to teach writing to students. She used the rule of "So What?" for students. Why is this story important or worth reading? New writers tend to write about things without having a clear idea about why this story is important enough to write. Obviously, people may disagree about what's important and what's not, but the writer should have a good idea about why it is.

Personal remarks. I'm a midcareer writer and I have a great sense of what stories are worth the time to write (your writing time is always limited, and you don't want to waste this precious resource on stories which ultimately don't matter). On the other hand, I've begun certain stories without really being sure if the story would work. Sometimes I got majorly stuck and spent a lot of brain cells trying to make it work. Several of those iffy stories became my most successful -- if only because I was trying things outside my comfort zone.

By the way, I often think of good premises for stories and characters, but often it's not enough. A good writer recognizes the difference between something which is a great premise (what if all teachers were 20 feet tall?) and a premise which can actually be fleshed into a plot and development of character.

There is value in doing a writing exercise, but mostly I try avoid doing gimmicky-like things to maximize my time on stories which really matter to me.

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