Thank you and you're welcome!
Short Story about Stories themselves being Alive!
I truly do hope it helps. Funny thing about the interwebz is that others might come up with their own ideas of how to do their own stories better after reading our posts. And as far as your story not being "complete", learn to expect it to never be complete, ever. At the end of a story, things can wrap up, problems are resoved, but it is not the end of all things to come. So unless you've somehow destroyed the universe, there is always room for a sequel. All works of art from the crappiest stick figure to the Masterpieces also are never truly "finished", but merely abandoned. And knowing that right balance of when to abandon a work of art is a mastered skill in and of itself. You might only spend five minutes working on a story, and get it sold to the Sci Fi channel, or you might spend five years and write the next Classic of our time.
Stories seem to take on "a life of their own". When you write the story, you start off creating a set of rules that the story itself will abide by. The story is then given characters, and the characters follow a direction. The characters are the ones that follow the "rules", and those rules define what they may or may not do in certain situations. The story itself doesnt exist without characters, so it isnt the story that is given a direction, but the characters. Characters merely obey the rules of the story, and if they are forced to do things they normally wouldnt do, they come across to the audience as empty shallow illogical soulless characters. They are forced to break their own rules, and the life of the story dies.
Sometimes the story itself goes in a direction that the author doesnt expect it to. It starts to want things for itself, to satisfy its own needs in order to maintain its own existence. The story itself wants to be personified as much as the characters in the story. It takes on as much shape and form and blood as the author is willing to feed it. And as it grows, its apetite continues to increase. It will want more and more and more until the author has nothing else they can give, and ultimately, it must be abandoned, lest the author be completely consumed by their own creation. If the story is not fed the life blood of the author, they will whither and die of neglect, but if they are fed too much, the author is so consumed by giving the story its sustinence of details, that the author is never able to finish and publish.
How in the world could a bunch of words grouped together be "alive"? It doesnt breathe, it doesnt eat, it doesnt think, right? The story is just a bunch of rules for the characters, but it is that set of rules that define what the story can and can not do, and it will "want" to do everything that the rules allow it to do. Every human being on earth is separated by a factor of six degrees. That means you know someone that knows someone that knows someone else, through just six other people that connect every single human being on the third rock from the sun. And the Interwebs have decreased that factor by at least one. A story could demand that the details of seven billion people be detailed in full, just by simply defining the rules of the story as "it happened somewhere on earth". And each one of those people have their own stories that they want to be told, as part of the bigger story. People network with each other, the same way as the characters that are a part of a story also end up networking. Right now, you, the person reading this, now has one degree of separation (not six) between yourself and Dakota Fanning, Emile Hirsch (found his jacket earlier today, it appears I accidentaly ganked it from him when I was working with him on the set of "The Motel Life", totally accidental), and half of the celebrities that live in this town. It is a very very small world, and continues to get ever smaller. We network. That is what we as human beings do. Its very similar to the way the neurons in your brain work. One neuron might not be hard wired to a neuron on the other side of your noggin, but they can communicate back and forth. Those synaptic connections start to define their own existence, regardless of their own self awareness, or awareness of the entity as a whole. The elements of your story exist by your imagination and your creative energies which define how they are connected, thus, they begin to exist, fueled by whatever your imagination can pump into it.
Stories are also like children. As they grow, they usually follow the rules, but sometimes they want to test the limits of those rules, and "misbehave". Stories start off by following a set of rules, but start to define their own rules of what they can and cant do, and in order to create those rules, begin to "demand" that certain events take place so that the logic of the story is consistent. An author has to know when to allow their stories to breathe for themselves, and to give the story what "it wants" in order to breathe. Listen to your own story. Its talking to you. It is telling you what it wants and what it needs. It might not be able to flat out state what it needs in specifics, but it will let you know. Give it what it needs and your story will bring your characters to life.
The quickest way to "murder" a story is to let someone else take a look at it as a whole before it is done. There is something about doing that which destroys the magic of it. Its your story, and for me to view it as a whole somehow poisons the effect. Your story will talk to you, not me. If it does start to talk to me, then it is no longer your story, which is why the magic is destroyed. You know things about your story that I couldn't possibly know. Most of the details of your story arent the words on paper, but are in your head. The motivations for the characters, the characters nuances, what kinds of relationships they have with each other. What goes on "paper" are just the major plot points worded out in a way which could be considered "stylized" like first person, third person, omnipotent, or expressed in rhyme, or metaphorically, and those are only considered to be artistic traits, but really have nothing to do with the real story itself. The story is much like software. It is a set of rules, and things happen according to those rules. The software of the story needs hardware to run, and that hardware is your brain. Your brain is a living breathing computer, so we could say that although the words of the story are expressed on paper or in a digital format, the story lives and breathes inside of you. Which is why it can consume you as an author, or it can whither away and die a forgotten memory. Your story lives and breathes and experiences its life through you and your application of your own life experiences. So I can not and should not be allowed to ever view your story in its entirety lest the magic that brings the living breathing feeling self aware story to life be poisoned. At least, not until that magic of the story is strong enough to make be believe that the events of the story are not only possible, but fascinating to me as well! Stories can become that strong! Hell, this entire moster wall of text post is nothing more than a story inside my head that wanted to be told. But a story is nothing without specific details, and asking for advice on filling in those details accomplishes its own purpose.
Now, Im not saying that asking for advice on how to fill in a plot hole can kill it. In fact, entirely the opposite. The smaller details are fine to revise. The author is the one that will have to decide if the way I suggest to fill in the plot hole abides by the rules of the story, so advice is just fine. Revisions arent just about fixing plot holes or taking care of typos. We all have imperfections which oddly enough make us more perfect as opposed to less perfect. Plot itself is more important than the way the plot is expressed, and research on the details (that the story is now demanding be included) feed the life essence of the story. Think "Cop Drama". Boooooooring! But the good ones that make you think were written by people that went out and did research on how to solve a murder, or thought extensively about a way to make the person that everyone thinks is a bad guy actually be a victim themselves. The big plot twist. The authors do research to better define the details of the story, which breathes even more life into it, rather than take away. And once you plug in those details, the story will develop an appetite for more and more relevant details. On paper, those details need to be expressed quickly as possible as to not bore the audience, but inside your head where the story is alive, all of the trivial things that someone might not know about some minor detail that aren't put down on paper in some creative format can live in their fullest complexity to their utmost potential.
Once you breathe life into your story, dont be afraid to let it take you where it wants you to follow. Dont force the story as that is another way that you can destroy that magic. Allow the story to live and go in the direction it wants to go. If you need to fight the direction of the story, that is the job of your characters. Your job as an author is just to record the story, according to its own rules, the rules that apply to the characters and say what they may or may not do, and just jot it down onto the proverbial paper as it happens. Then you can apply your creative formatting. Make it rhyme. Make it a comedy. Make it a tragedy. Make it symbolic ly mirror real world events. Make it a love story, or a cop drama. Make it metaphorical. The living breathing story is already all of these things, and as an author, you can pick and choose the words that describe the living breathing story to make it appear to me just one, or several of these styles of writing. Your only job is to jot down the right words for the right events in the story that the story wants you to jot down. Then your story will come to life, and will live on in the minds of your audience.