Serendipitous WritingPosted by dhoffman on March 4th, 2010
I wrote this, out of the blue, about a week ago. It had nothing to do with what I was actively working on, but it popped in there and, like a squirrel saving up nuts, I gave myself a few hard-returns, typed it up, hit SAVE and got back to what I was doing:
“I think Joe’s hitting on Jeff’s wife.”
“Jeff’s wife?” Kara says. “I thought he had a girlfriend.”
“Jeff has a girlfriend?”
“If he’s got a girlfriend, it’s only fair that Joe hits on his wife.” Drew’s laughing as she says this.
“Not Jeff, Joe.”
“Joe has a girlfriend?”
“I don’t know, does he?”
“Well, what about Jeff? Does he have a girlfriend?”
“No idea. I guess anything’s possible.”
“So wait, hold on . . . when has Joe having a girlfriend ever stopped him from hitting on someone’s wife?”
And, last night, while trying to sort out just what I was going to do with Chapter Seven, that little bit of conversation (which I’d found a home for in the previous chapter) tapped me on the shoulder and said, “hey, what about this?”
It was a nice moment.
And now a bit of difficulty I was having with Chapter Seven suddenly works amazingly within the greater context of the story.
This is one of the things that always amazes me about writing. Well, writing, reading . . . any sort of long-form storytelling. In my own work I see how the process works and I marvel at it. An idea I had two years ago? A note I jotted down, half-awake, apropos of nothing? Just what I needed.
When I read something or watch something and I see another writer doing that, I wonder how they did it. Was it on purpose? Was a moment in a book they wrote a decade ago purposely intended to fit into this new moment? Did they see the old thing, feel that CLICK and turn it into the new thing? It’s one of the most fascinating things, to me, about storytelling, and one of the great joys of my life, spotting things like that.