First Snow

After he finished writing the first draft of a novel, he decided to write some 500 word stories while he figured out what his novel was about.

The first snow storm of the winter hit the city the day he started writing the first story. An idea never came to him even though he spent the whole day trying to write it. The snow blew past his window all day and distracted him. He fell asleep that night thinking he should have written a story about snow. But the first snow, so recently fallen, was too difficult for him to make sense of.

The next day he started another story. This time an idea came to him shortly after he began writing. He worked all day on the story. Despite the many drafts he wrote, the closest he came to 500 words was a story 1,000 words long.

He would never learn what to put in and what to leave out.