Providence

One of my favorite techniques for coming up with ideas is pretty simple. Let me explain with an example.

It starts with haiku on Reddit.

I mentioned before that Reddit haiku is my jam but I want to be clear: not just any haiku will work. It has to be Reddit haiku specifically.

Reddit haiku has this addictive kind of honesty. It’s raw. Sometimes hard to understand. But the most important thing is: it often accidentally says something much weirder than the poet ever intended.

I do productive misreadings.

Tonight, I found one where the poem was a man screaming at an ocean. No more than this. It was beautiful.

The likely intended reading is he was alone or missed his beloved. That is not the reading I’m going for.

This is where the magic comes in.

First, why is he screaming?

What if it’s because a Lady of the Lake (I know this is an ocean but just work with me here) gave him a sword and he lost it somehow?

There’s the spark.

How did he lose it?

… what if he pawned it?

And I’m off.

It’s a wonderful method. It’s fun. I can do it for hours. It takes nothing beyond a web browser and something to write with.

The trick is not to ask what the poem means.
The trick is to put the poem in an alternate dimension and see what meaning emerges.

This is critical: your interpretation has to still work with the words on the page. Let that constraint guide you.

This is how I wrote Providence, which I just finished tonight.

It plays it completely straight with the sword origin story. Then there’s this line:

He pawned it
before it fully dried.

Smuggling a pawnshop into a poem that was setting up a mythic tone is just something I absolutely love.