Reach Out into the Universe
by Elaine Grant
A former writing teacher once told me that an infinite pool of knowledge exists somewhere out in the universe that anybody can tap for their writing needs. This wonderful ability could be used for research, ideas, anything. Okay, granted, she was a little other-worldly herself, but I thought it would be amazing to have this resource at my command. Only problem, she didn’t have a set of definite instructions on how to tap into it. It was some mystical, mental, maybe out-of-mind process that required a lot of faith.
I wondered if it would work for me. And there have been times when I’ve felt that maybe I did connect on that higher plane, when I’d intuitively write scenes, especially in my historicals and find an uncanny degree of accuracy when I finally had the opportunity to do my research. Where did that knowledge come from? I’d never been to England. Yet, I seemed to know certain things instinctively. It was fun to think it came from the “great beyond.”
Again, lately, I’ve wondered if there really is a shared pool of knowledge and ideas. This notion came back to me when I was invited to a chat with an author I’d never heard of. She was published by SuperRomance, a line I wanted to target, so I checked out her website and found she had a book set in Montana. Interested, I ordered that book and her latest release. Can I say I was shocked when I found multiple elements in her Montana book that were almost identical to ones in my Montana book. Setting, of course, but also the hero’s occupation, his wife’s hobby and cause of death, a child doing something similar to one of the children in my book. I was not happy. But there was no way she knew what I was writing, and no way I knew what she was writing. I read the book and was somewhat soothed. Her plot, her story, her characters were really quite different from mine. But still, I could write a blurb for my book that would sound a lot like hers. I read her second book. Well, dang, a very similar hero’s predicament to the thriller I’m writing. And her heroine’s last name is the same as my hero’s first name. But her books are straight contemporary romance, not suspense or thriller. Odd that both are very different from mine, yet have definite similarities. I decided that this author and I might be brain-sisters, thinking along the same lines, coming up with related ideas.
Then this past week, a thread started on one of my email lists. Another author had come across the same problem and like me, was concerned. When she asked if others had experienced something similar, I was surprised at the number of affirmative answers. Seems this is a common occurrence with writers. I was reassured by these responses, knowing that I wasn’t the only one. Someone offered the explanation that there are a limited number of core plots and of course those sixteen master archetypes for heroes we keep hearing about lately.
However, I still wonder, are the similarities coincidence, are they the result of the constraints of plot and character--or do we sometimes reach out into that universal pool and grab the same chunk of knowledge?
Copyright © Elaine Y. Grant
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