‘The further I go the better I see’: The short story collection as artistic series

Although iterative adaptation has long been a welcome and a valued part of the creative process in the visual and poetic arts, producing the artistic and poetic series, respectively, literature has long held fast to the adage that the same story should not be written twice. This article seeks to position iterative or repetitive patterns of ideation as intrinsic to the literary creative process, and as an essential part of literary adaptation and appropriation because, as new research into the unconscious mind is beginning to highlight, it is rooted in our cognitive processes; on a basic level: how we evaluate, how we think. Written from a practitioner’s perspective, this article draws on the writer’s experiences of creating a collection of iterative adaptations of existing reworkings of the classical myth of Apollo and Daphne, by Ovid, in his ‘Metamorphoses’, and Bernini. It draws on insights on the artistic series notably from Monet.