The Evolution of a Story

From inspiration to publication

One of the most common questions that authors get asked is some variation of “Where do you get your ideas?” For most writers, the answer is that we find them in our everyday experiences. This includes people who pen tales about ghosts, demons, and dragons. We don’t encounter those in real life, but we run across settings or objects that spur stories. Stephen King was inspired to write his novel The Shining after a winter stay at the Stanley Hotel in Estes, Colorado. The hotel’s isolated setting and a nightmare about his son gave rise to the plot of the horror story. And a very good one it is.

A couple of years back, my husband Andrew and I visited the abandoned zoo trail in Cisco, Texas. I’ve got a separate post about that visit – you can find it on the Road Trip tab and read about it if you’d like. Strolling through that place I felt it would make a great setting. I filed away the memories and images to recall at some later date. They came to life in the Spring 2025 Writing Battle writing contest. I received the prompts “Small Town Secrets”, “Zoo”, and “Rich Aunt.” The minute I saw “Zoo” I knew where to set my story. Once I placed the characters in that abandoned zoo I found the secret that they were keeping.

Getting words on the page is the hardest step for me, but the contest had a deadline so that gave me motivation. I ran my first draft through the ProWritingAid app to polish the grammar and eliminate most of the passive voice. After one last edit, I finished the story and submitted it to the contest. It didn’t win any prizes. However, I received some useful feedback from the other contestants. The trick to a good story is that it’s not the writing but the rewriting that makes it stand out. After editing the draft that I had submitted to the contest, I took my pages to my writing group and got their feedback. Then, I submitted the story to the Flash Fiction Magazine’s contest. It didn’t win there either, but one of the editors emailed me afterwards and offered to publish it in the magazine. With some edits, of course. I said yes and off we went on the last round of revisions.

My story, All We Have Abandoned, went through at least six rounds of editing before finally being published. Here is a list of some things that were changed through that process.

1. The title went from Forsaken but not Forgotten to the current one – All We Have Abandoned. I think the second title brings out the emotions felt in my trip to the old zoo and also fits the plot of the fiction piece better than the first title.
2. Some of the early readers mentioned that they couldn’t picture the point of view character. I realized that I hadn’t mentioned a gender or even a name for this character until past the halfway point in the story. Way too late – if you don’t introduce the main character early, readers will form their own idea of who that person should be. This can be jarring if they get the wrong picture of them and have to adjust later. I moved the narrator’s name up to the first word in the first sentence and added the phrase “no longer a little boy” as a second reminder of his gender.
3. I got rid of most of the “rich aunt” details that I had to include in the contest story but kept a couple of things about her character. She wears rhinestone-studded sunglasses and carries a cane with a silver handle. Those details I think will allow the reader to imagine her and also no a little bit about her personality.
4. My original draft included a full paragraph of back story about the zoo history. Fascinating stuff to me, the author, but not so interesting to readers who just wanted to get into the story. Cutting those lines allowed me room to add a scene where the main character encounters someone in the past.
5. Speaking of the past, I had a problem with tenses. There’s a flashback while the characters stroll through the zoo, but I wrote almost everything in present tense. Some of my early readers were confused about the timeline until I fixed that problem.
6. I made a small change to the ending, substituting one word for two in the last sentence. In general, I think it is always a good idea to cut words and this one change gave the story more impact and an ending that will stay with the reader.

Now, if you’d like to read the final, published story, here’s the link to the post on the Flash Fiction Magazine page: All We Have Abandoned

As always, thank you for reading!