I have a problem in that my plots seem well rounded until I start writing them. Then they twist and turn until the story is running out if control with so many ideas that I can't seem to cut the ideas from the story and it dies on the vine. Case in point, I got an idea about people being buried alive. Plotted it out and the execution seemed straightforward. My characters actually behaved and did what I wanted then to do, until 3/4th of the way through. Now I have the recovery to deal with when they were all supposed to die in the end. I have to figure out how the trauma has created each psychological issues and that is leading me down more rabbit holes. How do you stop a runaway train of thought?
Sounds like you're doing it already. Write it out, identify the issues, mitigate them as best as you can, edit, rewrite, rinse, repeat. The shit is really hard. If it wasn't everyone would be doing it.
Yep. Break it down into individual pieces and start thinking about them one by one, but keep the overall story in mind as you do, so everything you come up with contributes to it and doesn't work against it.
Your experience sounds like the typical writer experience of trying to spin straw into gold. Remember that it is all up to you, it all belongs to you and comes from you, and you decide what is going to happen next. Follow your instincts and follow your logic. And remember to breathe, and take the time to roll it all around in your head. The thinking part of writing I think is the hardest part, but we have to take time to do it.
One specific way to break it down into parts is to use a plotting method, for instance the well-known and ever-popular three-act structure. That tells you certain things that need to happen and approximately where, for instance you need a hook at the beginning to draw people in, then an inciting incident to kick off the story with a bang and get the MC fully immersed in it (along with the reader), then each act ends with a major disaster for the MC, until the climax and then the denoument. Within acts you have a smaller version of the structure, where each scene ends with a small disaster—life getting in the way of the MC's goal or kicking him when he's down, and he keeps persevering. Knowing things like his goal, his individual scene goals, his values, his hopes and fears, the big lie he believes at the beginning which gives way to the truth he'll know by the end, the thing he wants versus the thing he needs—all of these are ways of helping you keep that train on track toward its destination so it doesn't go off the rails. There are many different structures you can choose from, some based on the 3-act structure, some not. I'm currently using a 4 act structure designed to prevent the all-too-common sagging second act, which can tend to be too long and uneventful. So I broke act 2 in the middle and inserted another big disaster there (they come at the ends of acts, so each one you insert creates a new one).
Ah ha, magnetics would work. In fact, it could be a back story that gives a few hints of how it was built and that it fit between the tracks and when activated would drag on the train while the engine to the caboose pass over it.
