Forced relationships

This week I've  pushed myself into unfamiliar - and for me, uncomfortable - territory.  I've volunteered to perform two dark stories with T'articulation, which means that I have to write them.  And I resorted to an old trick from my professional work days to create one of them.

There is a technique for generating new ideas called forced relationships.  The idea is to have two lists of things or ideas, to choose one item from each list, and force them to work together.  Often the pair of ideas you're presented with are wildly disparate, and you wonder how the hell you're ever going to force them together, or get them to relate to the topic under consideration.

I thought of this technique while scrolling through social media posts and collecting a curious list of anecdotes and news stories.  There have been a lot of posts in the last week about the mysterious disappearance of an underwater science station.  The usual jokey suggestion was made that aliens had abducted it.  I liked the idea, but wanted to turn it on its head.  What if it was an alien science station, and had been left in the ocean to study human activity?

Then an old SF story popped into my head, Arthur C Clarke's The Sentinel.  This is about aliens placing an artefact on the Moon, and tells the story of the astronaut who discovers it.  I read that story over thirty years ago, and can still remember the tremendous dramatic tension the author created by having a lone astronaut trudging slowly up a rise towards the mysterious object.   So I've decided I'll try to re-create that tension - but underwater.

Then I saw an article about tattoos which mysteriously appear on people's bodies.  So I asked: what if one of those tattoos were a treasure map?  What if it appeared on a man's back and he didn't know about it until someone else discovered it?  Then what if his great-great granddaughter got the same tattoo?  Is this a family secret that stretches across generations?  The map, when fully revealed, shows a position in a harbour.  What's buried there?

I now have to write this story, which will feel a bit like another forced relationship exercise.  That's' the one where you start to write, then someone calls out a word which you have to put into the story.  It forces you out of your comfort zone.  But most importantly, the forced relationships force you to be creative, which this dark story will certainly do.