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Lorehaven helps Christian fans explore fantastical stories for Christ’s glory: fantasy, science fiction, and beyond. Articles, the library, reviews, podcasts, gifts, and the Lorehaven Guild community help fans discern and enjoy the best Christian-made fantastical stories, applying their meanings to the real world Jesus Christ calls us to serve. Subscribe free to get any updates you choose and to access the Lorehaven Guild.
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Accidents of Unexpected Creation

Sometimes accidents or unexpected patterns help create visual art or produce plot twists in a story. But can this sort of accident apply to the entire universe?
Travis Perry on Aug 23, 2018
9 comments

An event has happened to me is leading me to comment on accidents that happen to produce art. Examples, a brief explanation, and an application to the universe as we know it, follow below.

Note the new series I just launched is on hold for this week, because Travis Chapman and I are discussing joining forces and combining his ideas and mine concerning a guide to warfare into one book. (Perhaps if we do work together, we ought to call ourselves “Travis Squared” 🙂 )

Klecksographie by Kerner

But on the topic of accidents in art, I found a quotation on this topic from Leonardo da Vinci, in which he advised budding artists with creative block to leave behind a blank canvas and stare at the stains on walls: ‘If you look upon an old wall covered with dirt, or the odd appearance of some streaked stones, you may discover several things like landscapes, battles, clouds, uncommon attitudes, humorous faces, draperies, etc. Out of this confused mass of objects, the mind will be furnished with an abundance of designs and subjects perfectly new.” (I found this quote from an edition of Tate online, which has a very interesting article on this subject.)

A specific example of this kind of thing is found in ink blot art, as in the work by Justinus Kerner in 1890. Kerner added faces to random inkblots, making them into bizarre little fairies–or tiny demonic figures.

Victor Hugo’s V octopus

An example I like better is in Victor Hugo’s “Octupus With the Initials V.” Hugo took a piece of paper that he’d written on by hand, with an ink pen of his day, and looked at the back of the page. In some places, ink had soaked into the page from the front enough that it was visible in traces in the back. Hugo saw a pattern in the blotches and created a octopus figure out of it–and octopus with one of its tentacles shaped in the form of a letter V (from “V”ictor Hugo’s own name, it seems).

You might think perhaps Hugo only created a rather interesting doodle out of this. But in fact, both this octopus and Kerner’s work and many other examples of this kind of thing are considered serious art. (It seems Surrealists in particular were impressed with Hugo’s work.)

My own example of accidental creation came from a pair of book covers. One was for the book Mythic Orbits 2016 (a book I’ve published at Bear Publications), in which a real photo taken from the International Space Station formed the backdrop. On the front cover, the reflection of a castle in space is visible in an astronaut’s visor, but on the back, a robotic camera with an arm is present.

For the front of Mythic Orbits Volume 2 (Amazon site linked here) I asked Arpit Mehta (his Facebook page “Visuals by Arpit” is linked here) to continue the story of the astronaut by having him turn back, revealing the reflection of a dragon in his visor. (I plan to continue the story through future Mythic Orbits covers, the astronaut trying to escape the dragon, then riding it, taking it to the castle in space, etc.)

I had the original idea that the astronaut would not necessarily be turned 180 degrees backwards and that the robot would still be there somewhere, but unimportant and therefore off camera because the dragon would fly up through space to where the astronaut was. What actually happened was that Arpit picked an image of the dragon that occupies roughly the same shape and position as the robot. He didn’t do that on purpose.

So when I looked at the two covers, side by side, I realized what had happened. The backstory for the creation of the covers I’d imagined changed in my mind, so that the dragon didn’t replace the robot–the robot transformed into a dragon!

Being who I am, I wasn’t content to just go, “That’s cool!” and move on with my life. No, I had to think about what this means, what it implies about the nature not only of creation, but of the Creation, the universe itself.

You see, there are many people in the world who with straight faces regard the creation of the universe as what would in effect be a piece of self-generating artwork. They would say that serendipity does in fact happen at times–that beauty at times emerges out of chaos–and that given enough time and the right circumstances, the random churning of the universe creates occasional useful order out of chaos. Which happened to make you and me and everything else of value, they would say.

To this point of view I agree that randomness (or apparent randomness) can produce unexpected beauty or unexpected usefulness at times–but notice that Kerner and Hugo took a piece of randomness, saw a pattern in it, and made artwork. Their minds, their ability to see a pattern and make something out of it, was an essential part of the process.

And I created a story in my mind, which I modified when I noticed an unexpected commonality between two images.

But without any mind at all, there would be no recognition of art, no transformation of randomness into images or in my case, into a plot twist. In fact, without mind, there’s no art at all.

Are we really supposed to believe that creation–what I could call here, “useful art”–came first? And then minds who could appreciate the useful art which generated them came later? Isn’t it so much more straightforward to say that Mind (as in the Divine Mind) appeared first and the artwork came second? Artist first, then art?

But to return to the original topic after having made that point–since this post is going out to a group that includes many writers: What examples do you have of the unexpected events, accidents, which transformed your stories? And have you had examples of this sort of thing happen in other situations other than your stories?

Travis Perry
Travis Perry is a hard-core Bible user, history, science, and foreign language geek, hard science fiction and epic fantasy fan, publishes multiple genres of speculative fiction at Bear Publications, is an Army Reserve officer with five combat zone deployments. He also once cosplayed as dark matter.
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  1. Autumn Grayson says:
    August 23, 2018 at 3:53 pm

    These accidents happen a lot for me. Sometimes I’ve greatly mispronounced names I’ve read, only to find out later that the names were actually said way differently than I thought. But I liked the way I mispronounced the name, so that mispronounciation would be come the name for one of my characters instead.

    A lot of ideas also come while listening to music or watching amvs. This amv has given me one or two ideas recently, for instance:

    Reply
    • Travis Perry says:
      August 23, 2018 at 5:39 pm

      “A playground for sinners to play as saints”? Well that’s different… 🙂

      As a little kid, I was asked in a Sunday School class, “Who is Jesus?” What I answered was, “He’s the guy who killed the dragon who killed Cinderella.”

      That answer I barely remember giving, but it was the sort of thing adults repeated back to me (I did a number of highly unusual things as a kid that people talked about for years). It sounds like I was being super-creative.

      But I think my creativity stemmed in part from getting Cinderella mixed up with Sleeping Beauty and thinking Sleeping Beauty was actually dead…which means, yes, I thought Jesus was Prince Phillip… 🙂

      Reply
      • Autumn Grayson says:
        August 23, 2018 at 8:54 pm

        Lol. I’ve said/thought a lot of strange things as a kid, too. Stuff like that probably makes complete sense to us based on the limited info/experience we have at that point in our lives.

        That line in the song actually kinda sounds deep to me, though. It speaks to the human condition in a way. We are all actually sinners, yet we still try to be good and in many cases even think we’re better than we actually are.

        So we’re sinners living in a fallen world, trying and pretending to be blameless or at least right. And in the middle of all that we leave a lot of conflict and destruction in our wake.

        Reply
        • Travis Perry says:
          August 24, 2018 at 8:03 am

          Perhaps my thinking on the song was simply too literal–I imagined a specific place (though not specifically a playground) where people would go where they could pretend to be perfect. Which I found a funny thought.

          Well, I suppose churches are like that sometimes.

          But in fact, pretty much everybody pretends to be better than they are pretty much any place they go–people mostly (MOSTLY) neither want nor need a specific “playground” where they play as saints…

          Reply
          • Autumn Grayson says:
            August 24, 2018 at 1:48 pm

            Eh, yeah. I think the ‘Playground’ was supposed to either refer to the world, society, or to a neighborhood torn by crime and conflict. Part of the reason I say that is the line that goes something like ‘Heaven if you sent us down, so we can build a playground.’ Heaven sent us out into the world, and maybe ‘playground’ could represent the society we built.

            From what I’ve listened to in the lyrics, I think the song itself is discussing crime torn neighborhoods and all the struggles that come with them, but I haven’t done research into the song or singer, so I’m not for sure. The lyrics can be thought of in different ways, though, like the ones we discussed, which is the awesome part about music. Especially when we use them to inspire our writing.

            Reply
            • Travis Perry says:
              August 24, 2018 at 3:27 pm

              What do you write, Autumn? Are you on Amazon somewhere?

              Reply
              • Autumn Grayson says:
                August 24, 2018 at 6:11 pm

                I primarily write fantasy, along with some scifi. A lot of it is Christian fiction in some way, though not all of it is overt. Most of the stories address the ups and downs of life in all their complexity, so they can get a bit dark at times. My primary audience is teens and adults, though some projects will be aimed more at children.

                I haven’t published anything yet, though, since unfortunately my schedule leaves me with little time to actually finish something. I will publish on Amazon once I do complete something, though. In the meantime I try to blog about stuff, and will announce any publications I make on that blog, so subscribing/keeping up with the blog is the best way to know when I finish something:

                https://creatureofgraphite.blogspot.com/

              • Travis Perry says:
                August 25, 2018 at 2:07 pm

                I publish short stories and on occasion novels. Have you written any short stories?

              • Autumn Grayson says:
                August 25, 2018 at 2:46 pm

                I’ve kind of written and drafted out a few, but haven’t put them up online yet. The trouble with those is that they often end up being stories that are told by characters in my larger projects, which affects when I would actually want to publish those short works. I do have ideas for a few that will probably be ok to publish soonish, though, so I may start working on those in the coming months.

                I also write fanfiction, though since I don’t spend as much time on them as I would one of my original works, the fanfictions I publish are more like polished rough drafts than examples of what my original stories will be like once published.

                This is the main story I have on my fanfiction.net account. I’m not really proud of the prologue, but the first chapter sounds ok at least. It may be a little confusing if you haven’t seen Naruto and Naruto Shippuden, though:

                https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12948191/1/What-The-Winds-Bring

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