Fiction Projects

For want of a better term, I’m going to use the word projections. These are stories that are seeded in some snippet of conversation, or in something read, something overheard or in some personal experience and have then gone on to grow into something rather unexpected. Almost like having a pouch full of seeds, with no idea whatsoever about whether they’ll germinate and if so into what. There have been times where I tried to guess that the seed looked like that of an apple, but then what emerged put paid to any attempt of the mind to classify.

I don’t know where and when some other seeds had gotten scattered if you think about it, all of life’s experiences are really seeds, aren’t they? Every now and then, I’ve found something green spouting out of some internal crevasse. Not frequently enough to make a living out of story telling, almost always unexpected and mostly downright inconvenient. These sprouts invariably came up in the demilitarized zones of the mind there was no map of the mine-fields that had to be wandered through, even of only to figure out what it was that was growing there. Making me wonder whether they were only dreams or something more. Not that it matters either way.

Does all this sound like some substance-tripping? The only illustration that I have of what I’m trying to express is this little piece of writing and I don’t know how and why it happened, though it does connect up with something that I’d read a while earlier. But that’s not sufficient to explain the piece.

But now I’m laboring, so let me end this feeble attempt at explaining projections. Perhaps any explanation was bound to be inadequate after all, does a story need explanation, or even worse, justification?

And if any of the projections touches some chord, or sounds familiar, then it probably means that there are only so many experience-templates possible for humans and that you and I have had some common seeds!