So little time

For a long time, I've had this idea for a story.  As the years have gone by, I've tinkered with the story idea and the characters and the overall arc, and fleshed out a pretty big world for the whole thing to take place in.  I've written some history, and done some nation-building, and put in cultures and mythos and all kinds of things.  And the story has evolved into something bigger than I ever intended it to be.

One might even call it epic, in fact.

It's gone through a lot of iterations - the main character isn't the main character any more, and a side character has become more important, and some other characters have ceased to exist, etcetera.  And as I've tinkered and played with it, I come up with lots of side stories, like you do, which may or may not be fleshed out enough to ever be part of the overall world.

Last night, for the first time ever, I tried to lay out an overall dramatic arc for this grand, epic tale, something I'd never done before.  And let me tell you: it's a little frightening in its scope.  Tolkeinesque, even (I regret reading the Silmarillion now).

If I wrote nothing but this for the next twenty years, I might get through the whole scope of this thing.  I had no idea it had grown so out of control.  Apparently I've been thinking about it in all those times when my brain was on autopilot, like when I drive.  There's a lot there.

Just the world-building takes hours to read!

I'm not really sure I want to devote the time to getting that all down.  But by the same token, I'm not sure I want to let all that go to waste, either.  But what if I tried to write it and failed at what I see in my head?  What if the story is flatter than I'd like, or less interesting, or the characters not as alive and vibrant as I see them?

I guess that's just the risk.  At any rate, I'll probably explore outlining what I see as the first part of this saga, and go from there.  Especially since it seems determined to crowd out other ideas I have.