When creative prose springs from a single idea, the usual result pertains to events (fictitious or otherwise) involving people (fictitious or otherwise.)
So we read about the Ebenistas in Zagreb, and their re-naming of the month of December as the final blow to the religion they were about to overthrow once and for all. We read about the bad-tempered Preferential Ninkovic and his decision to cut down the atheists in a repetition of every war waged on the grounds of religion throughout history.
What is written correlates roughly with our experience of the real world - events happen in linear time with a start, a middle, and an end. Even if I jumble them up, the reader is still capable of organising them chronologically.
Ideas leading to consequences, and events which took place in a chronological order, even if I later randomise their sequence - this is the currency of our everyday lives; the things we talk about, the things we go over in our minds wishing that they were different, or trying to decide how they might have ever been worse.
This ancient ballast is the kind of thing that a writer needs to toss overboard, in the vain hope of wiping the slate clean. Then instead of extrapolating from experience, we can extrapolate from that which hasn't been experienced, from Joyce's ''Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!'
What happens if this monstrosity - the sound of the heavenly thunderclap which told Adam and Eve that the game was up - is the primary motivation for setting pen to paper, or finger to keyboard?
It is akin to leaving familiar mathematics behind, and immersing oneself in the (to me) unpredictable world of imaginary numbers. The thunderclap's effect might as well have happened prior to its cause, and this is the licence granted when we are pulling at the roots of our creative powers.
I imagine voices shouting out of the void with no speaker; the virgin rumble of thunder signifying that chronological order is only ever to be a myth albeit a very convicing one; objects randomly appearing and disappearing in a cosmic continuity error, and the Rosicrucians travelling into the future and deriving their ideas upon their return to the past - but before I can even think of writing about them, I first have to disabuse myself of the old biases which prevent me doing so.
