Metacognition: Writing My Short Story

Writing my short story was pretty frustrating. Initially, it went great. I wrote my story fragment, and it was actually pretty decent, especially considering I wrote it. I felt like it was open-ended enough to leave the reader thinking and that not knowing the whole story actually enhanced it and made it more mysterious. When I fleshed it out for my first draft, I added some details, but mainly just polished what I already had. At this point, I still felt that my story was going in a good direction. Then, I discovered that we were supposed to write a "middle", I was confused. I hadn't intended for what I had to be a "beginning", I had tried to write a full story. I tried my hardest to extend the story, and failed miserably. My story suddenly became about as interesting to read as Heart of Darkness. I was frustrated that I was being forced to do something that made my story considerably worse. The next assignment was to create an end for the story, and I was actually pretty satisfied with the ending I did. Though switching from first person to third person was kind of a cop-out, all in all, it wasn't too bad. Though I'm very disappointed with the middle of the story, I think the beginning and end are pretty good, and I look forward to maybe revising the middle to make it better.