Random Writing Thoughts

[hrj]

I've always described myself as having a "compost-heap mind". All my life I've been throwing stuff in there, almost randomly, and letting it digest away. It occurred to me, just the other day, that this was the ideal process to prepare me for the sort of fiction I'm writing. Yes, I've done some fairly focused research on certain topics, but for the most part it's just to pin down the specific details or terminology of concepts, events, objects, and activities that I'd already worked in to the story, more or less in their finished form. It would be a lot harder to get the sort of synergistic story-evolution that I'm really enjoying if I had to go off and research my settings and concepts from scratch. The process would also be harder if I regularly discovered that my initial big-picture sketches were going to have to be completely re-visioned because I'd based them on concepts that had no grounding in reality. But instead I have these layers and layers of well-composted facts and concepts and images just sitting there waiting for some story-seed to fall into them. Sure, it's great for trivia quizzes. But I'm realizing just how impossible my current writing projects would be without it.

Nothing profound here, just thinking.