The other day I brought my husband, Jeff, out to help me find some new large flower pots for our front porch. Since our usual hardware store in town didn’t have what I was looking for, we drove fifteen minutes to a different store.

While waiting in line, I looked up at the boy running the checkout and realized he looked just like I imagine a main character in my current WIP looking—high school age, Latino, friendly countenance, medium height, athletic build.  Then I glanced at his name tag and saw he had the same first name as my character! I tried not to freak out so that this kid didn’t think I was a psycho, but I did have to nudge Jeff and tell him to look at the living incarnation of a person I thought I’d made up in my head.

It was pretty trippy, and reminded me of one of my favorite movies, Stranger than Fiction, where an author actually does meet the character she is writing and then has to decide whether or not to write his death as planned. It’s a great melding of fiction and reality, and seems to suggest that the two often mix more than we think.

I heard author Ann Patchett talking about another instance of this on a podcast this week, but her experience was much crazier than mine. In her book Run she wrote about a character named Bernard Doyle who was Mayor of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and had two adopted African American sons. About a year after the book’s release, she went to speak at Marquette in Wisconsin and people kept talking to her about their governor whom they assumed she knew. It turned out that the governor’s name was Doyle and he had two adopted African American sons.

Shocked, Patchett actually sent Governor Doyle a copy of her book and a letter informing him that he might want to read that and see a lawyer in case he wanted to sue her! He wrote back saying that his whole family had read the book and loved thinking that it was about their family.

That’s a pretty tight coincidence, and I’m sure some would like to explain it away, but just as I had never seen the boy in the hardware store, Patchett had not followed Wisconsin politics, and had gotten the name Doyle from a family member.  She attributed the coincidence not to some magical happenstance, but to the fact that there really are no new stories out there.

Mark Twain said, “There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages.”

It’s crazy to think about this as a writer, because I spend so much of my time trying to be as creative as possible to come up with something truly fresh and new. But this idea that I’m really just aiming to piece together shards of colored glass means that the real art of writing isn’t coming up with an entirely new story. It’s knowing what pieces of life to collect and how to arrange and display them in ways that seem at once familiar and also new and curious.