Ideas are like eggs. They sit in the back of your mental henhouse surrounded by cackling until they're ready to crack out of their shells and move to the real world.
Put another way, the seed of an idea lies buried in the back of your mind until it germinates, then pushes its way up into your consciousness so you can let it bloom into full flower.
So it is with writing. You never know, really, what ideas have been planted, much less when or whether they will sprout. Sometimes you think you know, and credit someone else with having "put an idea into your head," or when you combine two elements, or link one concept to another -- connect a few dots, so to speak, to search for a pattern.
You use a guideline, something like this: Once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, but three times is a pattern. Then the question becomes, is it really a pattern? It may be just a series of disparate events, with little or no other connection than happening at the same time or consecutively.
Good writers, however, keep in mind a saying popular among detectives and criminal investigators: "I don't believe in coincidences."
Even if it is "just a coincidence," a writer's job is to describe the happenings and search for relationships.
Correlation may not be causation, but either way, you have a story.
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