Revolutionizing the Writing Process

I think I may be onto something very exciting right now. Last week, I had the job of writing my final short story to present on for my independent study, and as I wanted to produce something truly representative of my skills, I spent hours just trying to develop a worthwhile story idea/plan. I spent a lot of that time just thinking of interesting scenarios, in keeping with my typically vignette-style manner of storytelling, and had a few ideas that seemed worth running with. I came very close to starting a story about a boy who gets arrested for drinking or trespassing or something minor, and as he is being taken to the police station the officers who arrested him get killed by the cartel or gangsters or something. Thankfully, I did not end up spending any meaningful amount of time on that idea. As I started to grow frustrated with the process, I thought back to a lot of the writing I had done leading up to this point, and all the writing I had done thus far for my independent study, and noticed a theme. I would often begin with an idea that I thought sounded unique or fun, plan out a story with a clever ending that I wanted to reach, and then force a gang of characters along a set path to reach that point. As Mr. Litten pointed out a few weeks ago, sometimes stories and writers still working to get a good grasp on the craft can fall into the trap of feeling contrived or unnatural, flaws that can be tricky to fix in the revision process. To try and understand how to avoid this pitfall, I spent an hour reading through a book of short stories I found lying around, and noticed the fact that: a) many of them utilized very bare-bones storytelling methods with nontraditional plotlines and b) they were stretched over much longer periods of time than just a single vignette or scene. It has become clear to me now that vignette-style storytelling is much better suited to one-acts or films, and the short story really shines when it can mess around with form a lot more than a single scene can offer. With this realization, I got a lot messier than I usually do. I began concocting an idea and, instead of excessively planning and then writing from start to finish, I just wrote scenes and the main character's inner dialogue. I wrote excessive environmental information, a plot that moved at a glacial pace, and just vomited thoughts onto the page. My idea evolved substantially as the process went on, and in the end I produced what I think is one of my most raw and emotional stories to date. I would just write what came to me instead of what the pre-planned plot dictated, I would write out of order, and I would write only what I had ideas about. Nothing was forced and I ever sat down thinking "this is what I'm missing, let me come up with something based around that". The entire thing was just extremely organic. I can already tell that this is going to produce something most definitely worthy of being posted on this website, and might just well be the best thing I have ever written up to this point. More info coming next week.