“My thoughts are spirographs;
think intricate patterns of loops,
think waves that never break.”
― Sabrina Benaim
I know that all of us, at some point, have been sitting on our bed watching TV and suddenly thought, ‘OH NO, MY UNCLE REALLY WAS CREEPY BACK THEN’, and then moved on with our lives, only mildly wondering where those thoughts even came from.
But we are logical beings, and we live in a logical world (usually), so they *did* come from somewhere. Probably the bad guy character on TV had a mustache whose twirled ends reminded you of the way your uncle’s hair swirled, even when he was starting to go bald, and so suddenly that exact shape triggered something in your brain that you had never consciously thought of before, and then your uncle popped into your head.
This, while perhaps a bit too overly specific for you to completely connect with it, makes sense. It’s how our brains work. It’s how our brains work so completely that if we DO have a random thought and we don’t know why, our first thought is, “Where did that come from?”
Similar things happen when we are in conversation. If our friend is talking about how deep and cold the snow is, and you respond with, “I just don’t really like my washing machine as much as I thought I would,” your friend would probably either look at you like you were crazy, or assume you just weren’t listening to her. (Both of those aren’t great for staying friends, by the way.)
The point of all this rambling about uncles and washing machines is simply this: in order to make our characters believable we have to treat them like real people in real conversations. Which means that when your character is walking down the street and you, as the writer, suddenly remember that you haven’t mentioned that one side plot in 31 pages about how she’s accidentally got the key code to the bank vault that your other character needs, you can’t suddenly have her think, “Oh yes, those random numbers I saw on the slip of paper that the burly man dropped on his way out of the bank!”
While conducive to making sure the readers don’t forget that tiny slip of paper in her back pocket, it will kick the readers straight out of the story, and the main reason why is above. It feels fake to them. It feels to them like suddenly your character is made up, and that’s a death knell for reading. Because if those characters don’t feel like real people, and the readers can’t see themselves in that character, then what are they even there for?
Luckily, this is a really easy problem to fix with just a minimum of imagination. Maybe the numbers on the license plate in front of her are similar. Maybe she is walking past a bank and remembers what happened earlier. Maybe her significant other calls and is complaining that they don’t have any money, and suddenly she wonders what she has in her pocket. Any one of these bridges the transition gap between the world before your character thinks that thought, and the train of thought that comes after that.
And bonus: your readers will stay around too.