When we first start coming up with story ideas, we often want to remain as open-minded as possible. The craziest brainstorming can result in the most unique stories. *grin*

But at some point, we have to take those various thoughts for our story and assemble them into ideas that we can actually make work. Depending on where we fall on the pantser (those who write by the seat of their pants) to plotter spectrum, that assembly and planning step might be as detailed as a scene-by-scene outline or as vague as a notion of the type of story we want to tell.

Either way, this point in our writing process is the perfect time to avoid major storytelling issues down the line. No one wants to finish drafting a story and discover that a character aspect or plot point that the whole story hinges on needs a major rewrite to fix.

It’s far better to proactively be aware of potential major story issues before we get too invested in words that will need to be cut. And that means we might want to include a step in our writing process to question what story issues we might run into before we write too many words.