Why does Ray Bradbury use "flounder" for an action with a positive outcome? From "Just this Side of Byzantium" by Ray Bradbury: > It was with great relief, then, that in my early twenties I **floundered** into a word-association process in which I simply got out of bed each morning, walked to my desk, and put down any word or series of words that happened along in my head. I don't understand why Bradbury uses "flounder" which seems to have a negative connotation, but I think, based on the context, "a word-association process" is a gift for the writer, by which Bradbury writes his stories.

While "flounder" is a negative term, it denotes a process, not an end result. If you flounder ashore after a shipwreck, that you have escaped drowning does not make your motion retroactively graceful.

Bradbury is emphasizing that he was trying different things, basically at random, without much thought, and one of them proved fruitful.