Letting Stories Come Together

One of the most significant ways that stories come together for me is through collision and merger of ideas.  This can, of course, be a purposeful act, say taking two genres or concepts and shoving them together, but I am speaking about something different and more organic.  There are times when I will be working on a story, and then, somewhere in the back of my mind, an idea for a different story will somehow come to mind, and I will see a connection.  These are often ideas that would seem utterly incompatible, but something tells me that they fit together.

To offer an example, many years ago I had an idea for a story that would be a modern take on the notion of being lost in a labyrinth.  I had a fairly clear notion of that story in my mind but hadn't written it yet.  At one point, I had thought I was going to incorporate it into my novel, but that hadn't happened.  It was an idea in the back of my mind and I knew that one day it would come out.

Then I began to work on a different story, one that was about a man encountering a sort of magical book.  The character finds the book and it starts to speak directly to him, to tell him what he must do.  In a sense, it is attempting to guide him on his journey.  The overall concept was, again, a fairly simple one, though it was more nuanced and specific than the description offered here.

The point, though, is that as I was conceptualizing and plotting the story, at some point it became clear to me that this was also the labyrinth story, that the two fit as a single thing.  That may sound like an obvious connection to make, and perhaps it is, but the point is that by recognizing that these stories were potentially connected, the ideas began to merge and crosspollinate.  The merging of the concepts made me reconsider the book, and it became, not only so much a guide, but the labyrinth itself, and perhaps even the minotaur.  The entire idea changed and took shape in ways that were different than I had expected and I wound up with one of the stories I am proudest of writing.

Right now, in a similar fashion, I am conceptualizing a story about a girl who goes off for a summer internship at a scientific institute that she discovers is not what she expected.  At some point, that idea became merged with a story idea that I've had for a few months now dealing with AI, simulation theory, and the nature of reality.  I don't yet know what the result of this is, but the ideas have a strange cohesion, and the impacts of the ideas coming together are still unclear to me.  I have to write the story, but there are times when idea feels right and I have the sense that this will be good.

The thing that I wonder at, though, when I think about this like I am doing now, is whether it really is a merging of ideas, or just some sort of backdoor trick my unconscious uses to get me writing a particular story.  In essence, it could be that some part of my mind already knows that the two concepts are connected, but it feeds me the part I wasn't already familiar with, and when I realize the overlap, voila.  That may seem silly to a lot of people, to suggest that the unconscious mind might be that far ahead of the rest of me, but that kind of misses my point.  See, the key to this, for me, is that it happens so organically.  It is not a planned strategy, where I think of two ideas and just mash them up to create something new/  That can work, certainly, but it is a different thing.

The ultimate point that I am making is about discovery.  That sense of exploration and discovery is  the thing that makes these stories so exciting for me.  It can feel as if  I am uncovering a thing that existed already, unearthing it, as opposed to creating it entirely from scratch.  That is, it feels that the story is something that I am connecting with and sharing, that it has a deeper reality to it already.  It may be merely that I am discussing my own flow state, but I find it intriguing that this begins, for me, in the way the idea formulates.  It is as if, even at that level, I need to allow my unconscious to take the lead.  I must let it percolate long enough for the idea to come back unrecognizable.  

So, for me, I have to be open to trusting myself in ways that often require just taking a leap.  I am not, at the moment, really sure how some of the ideas in the story I am working on will come together, and I can see ways in which they don't appear, right now, to fit, but I also know not to worry about that. At some point, I am sure, it will become obvious where the story begins, and that will be enough to lead me through it.  While I don't have a desire to sit and wait for that to happen, I also realize that I cannot force it directly.  The best I can do is create the right conditions for it, and present the opportunity for it to happen, with the trust that it will.  

Writing, for me, is not a process that I can control totally, and yet, here I am, attempting to gain mastery over it.  To me, that is not a real conflict, but it is a very fine needle to thread.  On one hand, I know that I am not always going to be able to write exactly the story I might want to, but on the other, I can be prepared to always write something.  Doing this work daily, I know that what I am really doing is giving my unconscious my permission, my trust, and my encouragement, and waiting patiently,  Their is a collaboration that must happen between these different parts of the mind, but some of those parts can be shy, quiet, even scared, so my goal has to be to create the opportunity and to get out of the way.