Far be it from me, or even you, to determine what it is you are writing until you write it. And even then, you may write a thing, get it all revised, polished and maybe even sell it for a pretty penny, and still come back to change the thing, or later come to morph it into something wholly different than what it originally was.
Don’t keep yourself from this write, revise, morph, repeat process. It can pay you great dividends.
For instance. I scribbled off a very short story once, a first-person narrative, from a mid-40-something lady’s point of view. It was a tale of a sexy (or at least I liked to think it was sexy) flirty happenstance the protagonist made happen that ended up creating more questions for the lady than the answers she originally thought she was going to find. I sold this short. Then, I had occasion to consider the piece anew and revise it as a one-act monologue, which I also sold and sat in the audience watching being ‘put up.’ Since I work across a few different genres and types of writing, I find I can manage this reworking quite often and am pleased when I can. As much because it requires less wholly new writing as it is fun taking a thing that was once one way and seeing if I can make it another.
Now, you surely have to be careful taking something you may have sold or have been commissioned to write, refixing it and then trying to sell it again. Moving forward with something, even a faint copy, depends on the limits of the sale of the work in the first place. A short story and a play are two drastically different animals, but when fixing one story into another, you need tread carefully.
Surely, plenty a short story writer has sold the same story time over and over (again, dependent on the contract particulars of when you sell the story each time) and you certainly can take great ideas from one place or create some characters you might want to see appear in other spots. But mainly I want you to look at your work as having infinite possibilities.
Because, well, it does.
This is why I advise people all the time to just write the thing. Get it out of yourself, down on paper or across the word press document. See it made real, then you can as much figure what it is, what it might still need to become as you can take it and tweak it to be something else entirely or an offshoot of the original thing you made.
Again, the possibilities are limitless when you are open to write, revise, morph and repeat.
