Serendipity

[Bramblethorn]

One of my stories here is called "Riddle of the Copper Coin". The narrator is a redheaded woman called Penny. In the story she's wooed by a woman who tells her a fairytale that includes a riddle about (spoiler alert) a copper coin.

I had damn near finished writing this story when I realised that a penny is a coin, often made of copper. I'd just picked it as a fairly common woman's name without giving any thought to meanings. It works nicely in the story as a bit of word-play, and if I'd planned it that way I might have given myself a pat on the back for it, but it was just a happy accident that I only noticed after I'd written it.

Something similar happened in my current story: Anjali goes by "Lily" when she's escorting, and the narrator/her mistress goes to Amsterdam and brings her back a scarf with tulips on it. Again, I'd written that before realising that a tulip is a kind of lily.

Later, I went looking for a song that the narrator might sing at a karaoke night - I constrained myself to picking off a real karaoke playlist from RL work party planning. The first song I hit upon that the narrator would be willing to sing was Marlene Dietrich's "Lili Marleen". Another 'Lily'.

Writing is hard for me, but sometimes things just fall together beautifully by good luck. Have the rest of y'all had experiences like this?

 

[yukonnights]

I'm not so certain it is just luck. I don't think we fully understand the depths of our own subconscious. It's possible, and maybe even likely, something in your brain did pull out those clever connections — I kinda like thinking that's true anyway.

When I really get into writing, I'm in the story pretty deep. I'm in the characters, in the setting and in the emotions. Who knows what's going on inside my brain at that point?

It could be just random luck, but those would be pretty big odds, I'd think. I say; Take a bow for your intuitive genius intuitive-adjective; using or based on what one feels to be true even without conscious reasoning

 

[ElectricBlue]

Writing is hard for me, but sometimes things just fall together beautifully by good luck. Have the rest of y'all had experiences like this?

Yes - I've been writing my Adam stories for some time, then wrote one with a him and a Maddy - purely because that was the name of the woman I'd met in the street, on whom I based the character. The story went all yin and yang, anima and animus; but the anagramatic similarity was pure coincidence.

All my other name picks, though have either been deliberate or the first name that popped into my head that fitted the character.

 

[UsuallyPresent]

As yukonnights said - we REALLY don't know how we think, to say nothing about how we create!

There's a lot of interesting work on creativity all over the place, mostly interesting in how different their results are & how hosed up they all are. Selection bias is a HUGE problem for quite a lot of this kind of research, and very, very, very few of the works address it at all adequately, to say nothing of mitigating it!

Personally, I know I'm influenced by what I've consumed lately. Sometimes that's deliberately, like my 'Hinn' being explicitly based on Joe Brolly's genie-verse lore, but lots of other bits ain't all that obvious. I named a character after a coworker's (legal-aged!) daughter once and there are some similarities. Was shocking when I re-met that family later... still amuses me how this goop 'twixt my ears does stuff.

 

[lovecraft68]

Things like this fuel my theory that we write as much subconsciously as consciously. Our conscience which is our every day awareness drives the story-at least that's what we think, but beneath is the subconscious and there the story is already written, and I believe that's where things like Penny=Copper coin come from and suddenly at some point the conscious realizes what we did there, even though part of us knew exactly what we were doing.

 

[SamScribble]

Things like this fuel my theory that we write as much subconsciously as consciously.

Some years ago. I had an agent - a former editor - who used to say: If you find yourself 'blocked', stop thinking and keep writing. I think Ray subscribed to your theory, Lovecraft.

 

[SimonDoom]

I can't think of any similar, serendipitous connections in my stories, but I wouldn't be surprised to see them if I looked for them and found them. It wouldn't surprise me at all to find out that my creative process was doing things and making connections in my stories that I wasn't conscious of when writing.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Things like this fuel my theory that we write as much subconsciously as consciously. Our conscience which is our every day awareness drives the story-at least that's what we think, but beneath is the subconscious and there the story is already written, and I believe that's where things like Penny=Copper coin come from and suddenly at some point the conscious realizes what we did there, even though part of us knew exactly what we were doing.

I'm a firm believer in this - it's the only thing that explains how my stream of consciousness writing approach retains the coherence and consistency it does.

 

[ChloeTzang]

Some years ago. I had an agent - a former editor - who used to say: If you find yourself 'blocked', stop thinking and keep writing. I think Ray subscribed to your theory, Lovecraft.

That’s what I do all the time. Jus start writing and as soon as I do, things start to happen that I’d never thought about but the act of writing causes them to emerge.

 

[gordo12]

but sometimes things just fall together beautifully by good luck. Have the rest of y'all had experiences like this?

I don't know if I would call it good luck or somehow we're all connected to an underlying reality that impinges on our thinking/words in some subtle way.

I wrote most of a story (about 8k) initially titled The Rich Man last summer. Along comes the winter contest and I realized it could easily be rejigged to become a Christmas story. It had three buses in it originally. By the time I was halfway through the rewrite I realized the three buses were reminiscent of the three spirits and I was closing in a modern Christmas Carol story. It became "Following In Laura's Footsteps" and it remains one of my best received stories. Also Mamma, one of the characters, got universal acclaim. The readers loved her. As a result of this story one of the finer authors here, Chasten, showed me where I was making major mistakes with dialogue for which I thank him.

I have a story, yet unpublished, because the above dialogue lesson meant a total rewrite of older stories. However the plot dealt with something major to do with the academy awards and damned if it didn't come true at the last ones.

Transplant, one of my own personal favourites (needs a rewrite for the same dialogue reasons) also predated Hollywood announcing a show by the same name. Their plot is different (I think, never watched) but it was spooky seeing it just months after posting the story. I think we had a thread going at the time wondering if tv writers haunted Literotica looking for ideas.

Overall, I'm amazed at how many times I write elements into stories that become central to the plot somewhere down the line. All without any realization up front.

 

[lovecraft68]

I'm a firm believer in this - it's the only thing that explains how my stream of consciousness writing approach retains the coherence and consistency it does.

Jack Daniels can do that as well

I mean...so I've been told.