Generally the advice when writing is to pick a topic and cleave to that topic with a vengeance.

There's another approach, though - what you might call "jumping off." Billy Collins these days is the most popular poet in America, some say the new Robert Frost in that sense (though recently Amanda Gorman's got a lot of lift). He describes the "jumping off" approach as starting with a very specific, concrete, easily-imagined thing. It could be a tiny detail. It could be anything you want, but it helps if it's firm enough to hook people and they have no trouble visualizing right off the bat. (Incidentally, "right off the bat" is easy to visualize but spoken by rote. Only rarely will someone imagine the ball. A less remarked on visual will be more actually visual. But it may suffice to take the cliche out of its usual uniform: "as the leather orb splits from a crack of wood" or whatever.)

I mean, let's call that the "diving board." You really can't bounce up and down on a diving board that isn't there. It's gotta be there. And if not, you've gotta have something to put your feet on and jump off of, regardless. Otherwise you won't be diving.

The point is, after you've bounced up and down a couple times, or done a run-and-jump, you're in the air, subject to gravity and air resistance and how you pirouette in free fall.

In this kind of writing, where you end up isn't known to you when you start. Nor do you expect to end up in a place and a fashion that could be predicted from the diving board. That's kinda the whole point.

Maybe the easiest format of all for this is the haiku. Pick two aspects of nature. Now write a few words linking one to the other.

Bippity boppit

bippity boppity boo

ty boppity boo.

With so few moving parts, it's easy to imagine that you don't know the finale when you set down the overture. You could know, of course. But you could also pick a rock and jump off. You have 17 syllables to fall at most. (All right all right, syllable count isn't that strict in traditional haiku, but you get the idea.)

The "jumping off" approach overlaps with "pantsing" (writing a story without an outline, ie, by the seat of your pants) but can differ in emphasis. The one is about starting zoomed in to a detail and discovering a larger tableau in stained glass, potentially universal - beginning and end stuck together with magical thinking or sheer voodoo. The other is about the intoxication of real life that we all feel: we don't know what's going to happen next, even though we have a hand in directing it.

In both cases, the start and the end are different, and the latter isn't quite predictable from the former, though it's connected in a way that makes sense step by step - otherwise it wouldn't be believable, compelling, moving, elevating, tragic, etc.

What's interesting about the jumping off approach is that the end can be - and should be - so radically different from the start. Billy Collins describes this in various ways, especially as "a left turn somewhere." To be sure, full narrative should have twists, too. We've got some overlap here, but there's also parallax.

Maybe that's the best way I can put it. You begin a "jumping off" piece with a super vivid hook that doesn't have to carry any import. The import is where it goes, how you zoom out. As you zoom out, you notice this slippage between where you were and where you seemed to be heading and where you are. It's like looking out the window of a moving car: the planes of distances seem to disagree on how fast you're moving - and whether you're moving at all. But when you look closely, there is a progression. The static background and the blurred foreground are interconnected, flat bead by flat bead, billboard sprite by billboard sprite. You know it's all one big block of invisible jello out there, wobbling, with those moving pieces you see stuck in it, waving about at different distances.

That's a bad metaphor. I won't defend it, but I'm too lazy to try harder. Never mind the jello. But I'll stick with the parallax. I think that can be useful. Also the diving board (probably one thing Billy Collins said, but other writers do, a useful cliche). And the relation to haiku, and storytelling in general, but the claim of at least a little distinction.

In a short story, the parallax between beginning and end is about some discrete realization, which usually is either in the character, or in you about the character. Stories without character aren't stories, and short stories are short. This may sound a little pat, but there aren't too many other options, if you think about it. (Try, though. Distrust what sounds a little pat. Even a small exception is interesting.)

In a "jumping off" poem, the parallax is the sleight of hand of a daydream. You take some perhaps mundane but vivid focal point, and then you progress by accelerating shades to daydream about something entirely different, but you leave a trail of breadcrumbs as to how you went.

We started with a diving board. Now we are escaping the Minotaur's labyrinth. What does the labyrinth mean for us as living creatures? What might it mean that isn't that, or that, or that?