I wrote a scene where my main character got stuck in an elevator and it turned into 30 extra pages

So I was working on this short story last week, sitting in my living room with my laptop. The prompt was "describe a character's worst fear coming true." I meant to write like a paragraph about someone getting trapped in an elevator, just as a quick example. Instead I ended up spending 4 hours writing this whole scene with the character's heart pounding and her counting the seconds between breaths. It got so detailed I wrote about the smell of old carpet and the way the buttons felt sticky under her fingers. Before I knew it, the scene turned into a full 30 page chapter about her past and why being stuck in small spaces hits different for her. I had to scrap my original story plan and start over because now the whole plot revolves around that moment. Anyone else ever have a writing prompt take over your whole project like that?

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rowank691mo ago

Why not just trim it down instead of rewriting everything?