One of my favorite things to happen when I’m writing is when two unrelated things come together in sudden harmony. An unexpected twist based on an idea I had for another story, a motive that happens to foil another character, or a small development that comes back around years later in the story. I’ve thought long and hard about how these seemingly random connections can appear and make a story what it was always meant to be. It seems to me that the best story tellers are able to do this most frequently, connecting ideas that are too far apart for others to find common ground between. I’ve had to think about it so hard myself because none of the writing books I’ve read have been able to shed much light on this phenomenon. Most of them give a few lines on how amazing and mysterious it is, while some others go so far as to say that this type of intelligence is completely innate to the writer, so deeply buried in our unconscious minds that it cannot be learned. I’m out to discover whether that’s true or not, how this skill can be improved, and to find the best way to start making connections in my stories.

I think the most logical place to start off is with one of the first things I ever learned in English class so long ago: analogies. Analogies are the most basic form of abstract reasoning. They compare two or more things, usually a set number of objects, concepts, or relationships. Taking a look at the root word here, analog, it means ‘a person or thing seen as comparable to another.’ The most formal analogies that I learned in English class take this form:

A is to B as X is to Y

For example, bricks are to houses as words are to sentences. In this case, bricks and words both serve as the building blocks for larger structures, houses and sentences.

Forming a relationship in this way allows for a deeper look at the nature of all four concepts involved. For one thing, they all have to do with building. Houses and sentences are alike in that they are formed of smaller pieces within them. Bricks and words can both form new, greater structures that are more than the sum of their parts. But the most wonderful thing about analogies is that the meaning is often up to interpretation. Building may be the most obvious analogous relationship, but maybe there are more. One could also explore deeper into the first relationship by saying that a high quality house or sentence must be formed from high quality bricks or words. More generally, you might come to the conclusion that anything constructed from smaller parts needs high quality materials for the end product to be a good one. The possibilities are immense, even with a seemingly simple comparison.

More advanced analogies might reveal dozens if not hundreds of connections, sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, but always enlightening. Writers often make use of these on a small scale to make unrelatable concepts more easily understood. Similes and metaphors are the most common analogies. Here are a bunch that I’ve seen bouncing around the internet for a long time. These are some of the best/worst analogies supposedly written by high school students, and it’s always a funny read when I stumble across it. I think my favorite is this one:

The sardines were packed as tight as the coach section of a 747.

I love how it reverses the expectation, using the common idiom, ‘packed as tight as a can of sardines’ as the thing that needs explaining. If you’ve never seen a can of sardines, but have ridden coach, this might not even seem silly at all. It takes a real understanding of the original analogy to come up with this switcheroo.

The grander point I’m coming to is that finding the common ground between unrelated concepts can bring them together in interesting and pleasing ways. My favorite chapters in any story are when two characters or groups of characters find their paths intertwine. I enjoy maximizing these moments in my own stories. When two characters have similar thoughts, perspectives, or beliefs, especially about one another, opportunities to make connections happen abound. It’s the same as in real life, like when you find out someone has a shared interest or common hobby with you. Sometimes you see it coming from a ways off and sometimes it just happens.

I think one author who has mastered the art of merging and dividing the paths characters take through life is George R.R. Martin, author of ‘A Song of Ice and Fire,’ which of course was adapted into the wildly popular TV show, ‘Game of Thrones.’ The many dozens of characters always seem to weave into each others lives in the most delightful ways, making it all the more hurtful when they inevitably die a gruesome death because you just know they would have lived to have an impact on someone else had those treacherous Lannisters not gotten involved … Anyway I’m not still bitter about that show at all.

Another of my favorite connections is when two or more characters come to learn the same lesson from different perspectives. In the novel I’m reading right now, ‘The Covenant of Water,’ this happens a few times in the cross generational sense. The first character in the book is a young girl in an arranged marriage. One of the worst aspects of this marriage is that her mother forbids her from returning home to visit, fearing that this will alienate her from her new husband. This is a huge point of conflict and haunts her marriage for several years. Much later in her life (about halfway through the book) her son gets married to his sweetheart and things are happy. Due to some insecurities on his part though, a conflict with his new wife comes to a head and he forbids her from visiting home. His mother, who the reader knows went through an analogous situation, chews him out and explains how much good it would have done her to visit home, thus convincing him to let his new wife see her father. He even begs for forgiveness for his insecurity. For the son to learn this lesson from her after she learned it first hand over the course of several years is incredibly cathartic. This kind of abstract connection can be broken down into our original, more formal analogy:

The mother’s pain is to her parent’s insecurity as her daughter-in-law’s pain is to her son’s insecurity.

Once you know the pattern it’s much easier to find this sort of thing in stories you know, and of course in your own writing as well. You don’t need to know the concrete ways in which these connections will appear to set up the conditions for them to arise. I seriously doubt that Verghese knew from the very beginning of the story that his main character’s son would one day go on to inflict the same pain on his wife that was inflicted on her, but by knowing this character well, and deeply exploring her relationship with her own mother, he was able to keep an eye out for similarities in the future. It’s much easier to create an analogous relationship with an existing set than it is to start from scratch. Kinda like how that high school student turned ‘packed in like a can of sardines’ on its head, Verghese was able to turn the original relationship back on itself and make a valuable lesson out of it.

I hope this has made one of the more slippery aspects of writing a little easier to grasp. There’s still a lot I don’t understand about this part of writing, but I think I’m slowly coming to terms with it. I hope one day I’ll be able to do this as well as all the masters can.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley