My puzzle pieces are not your puzzle pieces, even though they look the same

Let me explain what I mean. I've used the analogy of building a brick wall to describe the process of writing a story before, but let's take the same process and use a different description. When I write, I want to have a cohesive whole when I'm done. I want something that my wife can hand to a co-worker and say, 'Read this.' When that stranger is done, they should have a clear picture in their heads. One image. People can interpret it in all the different ways that they want (and that's one of the ways you can tell the goods ones, in my opinion), but they will agree that they see the same thing.

The irony is, that one image is put together from hundreds of smaller images. In your average work of fiction, most of the major characters are assembled from traits lifted from parents, friends, and people who once sat next to the author on the bus. If a location like a park or a house only has a minor part in our story, we can import it from real life. If we're going to do something unwholesome with it, like have the little old lady character stop there to check her map and see a gaunt, withered woman walk toward her, dragging her long hair on the ground and leaving a wet, bloody trail, well then maybe we should make up our own location. Or pick a real one and modify it (change the little pieces that make up the big piece) so much that its unrecognizable.

Now if I take these pieces:

An old Twilight Zone episode, The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street.

A sound bite from a segment of This American Life, describing how a family deals with a grandmother's progressing Alzheimer’s.

News story after news story about young, growing boys and girls walking away from their families and lives to join Islamic State.

My experience tonight walking the dog. Seeing darkened houses and empty streets. Everything was silent, except for the music coming from one house at the end of a cul de sac; a light, carefree tune from the forties. Something to dance to in a wholesome, innocent manner, imagining that all your troubles are over and that no new ones will ever arrive.

I can mix them up and around in my head and see how they might fit together. Does the grandmother listen to the music, or does she keep asking where her favorite grandson is? Are things as cozy and friendly on Maple Street as they seem, or has our grandmother started spilling some of the embarrassing secrets that she's collected over her long life?

Now, you and I both have that same set of pieces, but here's the trick. They won't fit together for you the same way that they will for me. I've given you a couple of examples of how they fit in my head, but how would you have assembled them on your own? What are the odds that you would have come up with those specific pairings? Even assuming you and I both write horror, if piece A fits with piece B for me, you'll put A with C, and I'll ask you where the hell you got that connection point on C because I didn't see it until you showed me. We're all our own machines, churning out our own results no matter if you input the same data into two of us, or two thousand.

Now this is not going to hold up as an excuse to plagiarize someone's finished product, believe me. There are the writer's equivalents of brush strokes, as well as people's ability to pick up the intent and the feeling of a piece of writing, good or bad. That's not even taking into account the patterns that any decent search program can find. Get your own pieces, and write your own puzzle.

That's what I'm going to do, get back to writing.