Or tomorrow either, for that matter.
*****
This work is in the public domain because it was published in the United States between 1923 and 1977, inclusive, without a copyright notice.
Addendum
Author: Kathy Waller
Blog today?
I would prefer not to.
*****
Image by Joseph O. Eaton and an unknown etcher (Library of Congress) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
The Formula
Should I or shouldn’t I?
Tell, that is.
Experts advise against it. When you tell people you’re writing a novel, they reply.
“You still haven’t finished that thing?”
“Why is it taking so long?”
“How much longer are you going to have to work on it?”
“You need to just get busy and write it.”
The questions above fall into the category called Irritating. But the questioners don’t know any better. They’re not familiar with the writing process, they don’t know the difficulties of getting an agent, they don’t know how competitive the market is, especially as we transition into the digital age.
There’s another category of questions that, while unsettling, might be classified as Helpful.
For example, when a writer friend told an acquaintance she was working on a mystery, the acquaintance said, “Well, there’s a formula for that, isn’t there?”
Yes, there is a formula. No, you don’t just make up some new characters and fill in the blanks. No, it doesn’t make the writing any easier.
No–and here’s the answer to the real question–a formula doesn’t make the writing any less worthy of respect.
On the topic of the formula, please take note of the following:
Shakespeare wrote his tragedies according to a formula: five acts, technical climax at the midpoint of Act III, dramatic climax at end of Act V, protagonist with tragic flaw that causes his undoing, etc., etc., etc. He used similar formulas for comedies and histories. His sonnets comprised fourteen lines, iambic pentameter, rime scheme (ababcdcdefef), tied up with a couplet (gg) at the end.
Jane Austen used a formula: Darcy’s first proposal (and subsequent withdrawal of proposal) comes at the exact midpoint of Pride and Prejudice. Open the book to the proposal, and you get half the pages on the left and the other half on the right. It marks the point at which Elizabeth both realizes her folly and loses control of the action.
Edgar Allan Poe wrote according to formula and also wrote an essay explaining the formula.
Aristotle mentioned something about a formula. Writers check out his rules to make certain they have all their bases covered.
From the uninitiated, a formula may elicit sneers.
But Writers, even the Great Unpublished, are proud of the formula, and proud of the company we keep.
Bambi’s Mom
My niece posted on Facebook that for family night, they watched Bambi. She said she cried.
She didn’t say what the children did. The son is twelve and the daughter is only two, so I imagine Mom shed most of the tears.
How Dad fared, I don’t know. I remember that, as a nine-year-old, he wept into a dishtowel at the end of a non-Disney Sleeping Beauty. But that was back when I was in college. He might react differently now.
The mention of Bambi reminded me of the first time I saw it. That was 1988, a year before it was released on video. I was staying in Austin while my mother was in the hospital there. She was scheduled for radiology all afternoon, so I headed out for the movie.
This hospitalization had been unexpected, and it came at the end of two difficult years. Fifteen years before, she had made a remarkable recovery from a near-fatal heart attack, but lately her condition had deteriorated. She was unable to walk unassisted, and she had no energy for even conversation. Over the past months, she had become less and less communicative.
When at a regular appointment I told her cardiologist she had no short-term memory, he called for a phlebotomist, got a blood sugar reading of over 500, and told me to drive her to the hospital. Before we left, he explained that, because of his own failing health, he had dropped his hospital practice. One of his colleagues, Dr. M., would be in charge of her case.
Dr. M. made rounds that evening, handled the immediate problem, drug-induced diabetes, then proceeded to take Mother off all her usual meds and start anew.
I liked the doctor. Mother, however, in her foggy mental state, decided he had done away with her cardiologist. I couldn’t convince her otherwise. She spent the next two weeks being rude to Dr. M. As her mental condition improved, so did her talent for being snippy.
I spent the next two weeks apologizing for her and trying to make him understand that the person lying in that bed being snippy was not my mother.
Under other conditions, I would have thought it was funny. With diagnosis and prognosis uncertain, and Mother oblivious to everything except a doctor she suspected of kidnapping, I was miserable.
So I headed off to a matinee.
It was late August, and hot. The audience comprised a few dozen grandmothers with tots in tow, and me.
I sat near the back. The movie was beautiful, as the old Disney animations always are.
Then we got to the part about the fire. Bambi couldn’t find his mother. He called for her.
And out of the darkness came a little voice: “Where’s his mother?”
Then, from the other side of the room: “He can’t find her.”
One after another, the voices continued.
“Where is she?”
“Where did she go?”
“He wants his mother.”
That’s when I lost it.
I wanted my mother, too.
My story had a happier ending. Under the new regime, Mother improved. She returned home. A month later, she announced she would take over the kitchen again.
Six months later, I finally got her to understand that Dr. M. wasn’t a kidnapper. I also told her she’d been a stinker. We had a good laugh about it.
About Bambi, I don’t laugh. I remember the fawn looking for his mother, and the voices of children, who understood better than anyone else what the movie is about.
Screenshot from Bambi, by Walt Disney (Original Trailer (1942)) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Mercury Poisoning
A Facebook friend posted a quotation concerning Congressional action on budget cuts from the Seattle Times.
When I read the article from which the quote was taken, my eye fell on the following:
When I read the article from which the quote was taken, my eye fell on the following:
“[___] led the way on a 250-177 vote to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from imposing limits on mercury pollution from cement factories. Supporters said the new rules would send American jobs overseas, where air quality standards are more lax or non-existent.”
I’ve omitted the first word. Who led the way isn’t of concern at the moment. This isn’t a political blog, and politics isn’t the issue.
Mercury causes nerve damage.
That’s the issue.
It’s not an opinion. It’s a fact.
It’s science.
“The EPA estimates that one in six women of childbearing age has enough mercury in her bloodstream to put her child at risk for health problems.” (“Why Mercury Is a Problem,” link below; also cited in other of the articles linked below.)
That has is present tense. With continuing exposure, the problem will get worse.
Brain damage, lower IQs, learning disabilities; numbness and mobility problems; contaminated land, water, air; contaminated food supply.
That’s it for tonight.
I don’t have what it takes to continue with this, much less to write the post I’d planned.
I’ll try again tomorrow.
Related Articles
- Report Says Mercury Pollution is Health Threat (doyourpart.com)
- New Report Details 285 Lbs of Annual Mercury Pollution from New Jersey Power Plants (gloucestercitynews.net)
- NY Cement Factory Singled Out as Source of Mercury Pollution (news.change.org)
- EPA Limits Mercury Limits in Gold Mining Operations (environmentalleader.com)
- Of the 12 largest emitters of mercury air pollution among U.S. gold mines, 8 are in Nevada (yubanet.com)
- Texas Rep. Moves to Weaken Standards on Mercury Emissions (health.change.org)
- Natalie Portman Enlists The Help Of Scientists To Limit Mercury Pollution (ecorazzi.com)
- As Ravena study finds mercury in cement plant neighbors, GOP moves to block cement plant mercury limits (timesunion.com)
- Does Congress really want to encourage mercury pollution? (switchboard.nrdc.org)
- Why Mercury is a Problem (sierraclub.typepad.com)
But at My Back I Always Hear…
The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
~ Robert Burns, “To a Mouse”
I was poised to write a meditation on best-laid schemes going agley, and why Ogden Nash’s verse disappeared from the Valentine’s Day post, when two lines of Burn’s “To a Mouse” caught my eye and insisted on a comment.
Wikipedia, my source for the lines quoted above, displays parallel versions of the poem, Burns’ original on the left and the “standard English translation” on the right.
In stanza one, the poet addresses the mouse whose nest he has plowed up, saying it needn’t run from him. The original reads thus:
Thou need na start awa sae hasty
Wi bickering brattle!
The corresponding lines translated into standard English read this way:
You need not start away so hasty
With argumentative chatter!
That is just sad.
I checked the thesaurus for bickering. Alternatives include quarreling, fussing, quibbling, squabbling, and sassing.
Any one of those, I contend, would be superior to argumentative as an adjective describing chatter.
You need not start away so hasty
With quibbling chatter.
Quibbling’s near alliteration both mirrors that of the original (bickering brattle) and scans better.
I don’t know who came up with argumentative, but the scoundrel had a tin ear.
Now that matters of poetry have been taken care of, I turn to the reason the mouse is here at all–the idea that plans can fall through, and one of mine did, but after the fact.
On Valentine’s Day, I posted a three-line verse by Ogden Nash. Yesterday, for no apparent reason, the little word copyright floated through my head. And then the term fair use, and a question as to when Nash died, and then words such as infringement and cease and desist. And what are the rules about using contemporary poems in their entirety, and what is the status of this blog regarding fair use?
I’ve been hypersensitive about copyright since my library days. I went to conferences and heard stories about a certain mammoth entity that sent cease-and-desist letters to mothers who showed videos at five-year-olds’ birthday parties. The zinger was that if my school district ever received such a letter, it would be addressed to me.
I didn’t want one.
But instead of panicking at my poetic predicament, I decided my best course would be to remove the Nash poem pending the time I clear the cobwebs and get all the issues straight in my head. I used to know copyright for educators. The one thing this blog is not is educational.
I don’t think Ogden Nash would mind my using his little verse. I believe he would pronounce it just dandy that I put him on the web. Furthermore, I doubt his publisher or his estate or anyone else would come after me, my pockets being so shallow they’re almost dried up.
But there’s a moral issue. It’s Ogden Nash’s poem, and if I’m not supposed to use it, I’m not supposed to use it.
I wouldn’t want anyone using my words without permission either.
So I took the poem off and replaced it with one by Sir Philip Sidney, who has been dead for several hundred years, and about whom there should be no question.
Hurrah for the public domain.
What I really wanted to do, however, was to replace Nash with a verse by Robert Herrick: “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time.” I love that poem.
Somehow, though, it didn’t seem quite the thing for Valentine’s Day.
The day after Valentine’s, pushed to the brink by those lovely paintings, I cratered. That’s how that happened.
Thirty-two years ago–wow!–I complained to my seniors that when they walked out the door of the classroom, they left literature behind. I said they should take it with them, think about it, talk about it.
I must have been feeling very sorry for myself that day.
Anyway, the girls spoke up and said they did talk about what they’d read. Just the other day, in fact, while they were in the locker room, getting dressed after P.E., they had told the freshman girls about “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time.”
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may…
“Why,” I said, “did you tell the freshmen about that one?”
Another scheme gone agley.
The Class of ’79. That’s what my wow was about. That was thirty-two years ago.
Those kids are getting old.
They’re almost as old as I am.
But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near…
Thank you, Andrew Marvell.
Measured against the deserts of vast eternity, their transgression seems small.
Carpe diem.
**********
Image of field mouse by jason bolonski, via flickr, under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.
Gather Ye Rosebuds…
To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying.
The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
The higher he’s a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he’s to setting.
That age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times still succeed the former.
Then be not coy, but use your time;
And while ye may, go marry:
For having lost but once your prime,
You may forever tarry.
Happy Valentine’s Day
My true-love hath my heart and I have his,
By just exchange one for the other given:
I hold his dear and mine he cannot miss;
There never was a better bargain driven.
His heart in me keeps him and me in one:
My heart in him his thoughts and senses guides;
He loves my heart for once it was his own,
I cherish his because in me it bides.
His heart his wound received from my sight;
My heart was wounded with his wounded heart;
For as from me on him his hurt did light,
So still methought in me his hurt did smart:
Both equal hurt, in this change sought our bliss,
My true love hath my heart and I have his.
~ Sir Philip Sidney
Image by Faith Goble via Flickr, under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License.
More Than Birds and Sunsets
The photograph of Emily Dickinson’s handwritten manuscript displayed in yesterday’s post was illegible, so I offer a transcription.
*****
Wild nights! Wild nights!
Were I with thee,
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!
Futile the winds
To a heart in port,
Done with the compass,
Done with the chart.
Rowing in Eden!
Ah! the sea!
Might I but moor
To-night in thee!
So there.
One of the literature textbooks I used the first years I taught, in the early ’70s, described Emily Dickinson as America’s greatest woman poet.
I’m ashamed to say I had to take a course in literature written by women (with a stroll through The Second Sex) before I realized the idiocy of that statement.
Emily Dickinson is America’s greatest poet.
Period.
Emily on Winter
The sky is low, the clouds are mean,
A traveling flake of snow
Across a barn or through a rut
Debates if it will go.
A narrow wind complains all day
How someone treated him;
Nature, like us, is sometimes caught
Without her diadem.
~Emily Dickinson
Image: New England Early Winter. 1949. By S.L. Gerry (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Comm
Dr. Luckett’s Babies
When Dr. Francis Carlton Luckett arrived in the tiny farming town of Fentress, Texas, with his wife and infant daughter, in 1917, he planned to stay for one year. He moved there from Valentine, Texas, to fill the practice of a doctor who was serving in World War I. He said his family had nearly starved in Valentine because no one there ever got sick.
The local doctor, however, didn’t return home, but chose to move to San Antonio instead.
So Dr. Luckett remained in Fentress until his death in 1965.
Doctor Luckett was small–not much more than five feet tall–and spoke with a quiet, slow Mississippi drawl and a bit of a lisp. He moved slowly. There was usually a cigarette hanging precariously from his lower lip. How it stayed in place, no one ever knew.
I was fascinated by the photographs of his graduating class hanging in the dark hallway that led back to his waiting room. My mother would hold me up and point out the young man with the handlebar moustache who looked nothing like the doctor we’d come to visit.
He had worked his way through medical school at Tulane by playing the organ in a theater while silent films were shown.
He shared his music with the community by giving concerts and playing for weddings. More than once, he dismantled the organ in his living room, transported it to the Methodist church (whose organ was not in the best of shape), and rebuilt it so he could play at the weddings of young women whose births he had attended. He wrote a piano rag, “Hospital Row,” but, unfortunately, never put it on paper.
Dr. Luckett drove Cadillacs. In the 1950s they were finned and nearly as long as our small-town blocks. He looked very small sitting behind the wheel of those big cars. He drove slowly, starting at his two-storey house at the end of our street, gliding by our house in the mornings and then back home for lunch, and an hour later back to the office.
His personal life held much sadness. After his wife died, he reared his three little girls, just as he had reared his younger sister after their parents died. His oldest daughter died when she was in her forties.
Doctor took trips abroad and then told about his experiences in Sunday-night talks at the Methodist church. He took a three-month trip around the world while my mother was pregnant with me (a fact my parents successfully kept secret from my grandmother). On his last trip to the Holy Land, he brought back a vial of water from the Jordan River, and two infants–one the last baby he delivered, and the other, the last baby named for him–were baptized with that water.
Dr. Luckett was traditional in his views. I was six years old when I heard him agree with my Great-aunt Ethel that Man would never go the moon because it wasn’t in the Bible. They also agreed that when the new dial telephones were installed in Fentress, there would be trouble, because people would get the O and the zero mixed up.
Although he used the relatively new antibiotics liberally, Doctor believed in the healing properties of icthyol–“black salve.” Every house in town probably had a jar. My mother slapped the nasty ointment on me every time I picked up a splinter. I inherited a round cardboard container of it, with Doctor’s name handwritten in faded ink on the lid. He had prescribed it for my great-uncle’s mother-in-law, who died in the late 1940s at the age of nearly one hundred. I’ve never opened the container, but I suspect the contents are still good.
Dr. Luckett was an excellent surgeon and obstetrician. He charged $25.00 for a “baby case,” explaining privately that he chose the figure because it was low enough that he might get paid, and if he didn’t, it wouldn’t matter too much.
There’s no telling how many babies he saw into the world. He delivered my father’s youngest brother in 1919. He delivered me in 1951. In fact, my mother credited him with my being born at all. Several year before my birth she had lost a full-term baby because her doctor had not realized she would need a C-section. Later she learned that Dr. Luckett had asked one of her friends, “Is Crystal going to have a Caesarean?” When the friend said no, he had said, “She’s going to need one.” He’d never been her doctor, but just by observing her build, he had known.
Doctor and I had an excellent working relationship. He gave me shots. I blamed my mother.
He shot me full of penicillin for chronic throat and sinus infections (he and I are no doubt to blame for several antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria, but in the ’50s it seemed the right thing to do). He hated to use needles on children, and somehow I knew that, so he and I remained friends. My mother was the enemy.
When I was six, he removed my tonsils, which were in such bad condition they fell apart in the forceps and and he had to pick them out piece by piece.
My mother was the enemy there, too. The book about tonsils said that during my convalescence, I would be fed ice cream, but when I said I was hungry, the nurse brought me red Jello. It stuck to my stitches. Thirty years later, when I complained, my mother asked why I didn’t just ask for ice cream. She hadn’t known it was an issue. I told her she was supposed to have known.
I should have mentioned it to Doctor. I’m sure he would have prescribed ice cream.
Dr. Luckett practiced until just a year or so before his death. When he died, it was because he just wore out. He had spent his life giving to the community.
In his early years in Fentress, Dr. Luckett lived next door to my father’s uncle and aunt. They thought highly of him, and their son went into medicine because of his influence.
Not long before her death, Aunt Bettie told me a story I’d never heard:
Soon after Dr. Luckett opened his practice in Fentress, he was called to deliver the baby of an Hispanic woman, the wife of a farm laborer. He entered the one-room shanty and found the pregnant woman lying on a bare dirt floor. Chickens roamed loose a few feet away.
He was horrified. He later said he had never seen such misery.
Riding back to town in his buggy, he said to himself, “This must not be.” He went to work creating a small maternity ward in his office building on the main street of town. For the rest of his years there, he required women who didn’t have a proper place to give birth, and who couldn’t afford hospital care, to come to his clinic. He was determined to give their children the best start in life that he could.
“When he provided a good place for those women,” said my aunt, “he raised the level of our community.”
And he no doubt saved dozens, perhaps hundreds, of lives of both women and children.
In the mid-1990s, thirty years after Dr. Luckett died, a clerk at a pharmacy in San Marcos, fifteen miles from Fentress, noted the address on my check and said, “Fentress. I was born in Fentress.”
My Southern upbringing coming to the fore, I asked about her family.
“Oh,” she said, “my family never lived there. I was just born there.”
She had no idea that her mother had given birth at Doctor’s clinic.
There was something else she didn’t know–that we were part of the same family.
We were both Dr. Luckett’s babies.
Image by HujiStat (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Just Wo-ahn Out
Sometime back in the 1930s, my grandmother picked up the telephone receiver just in time to hear the Methodist minister’s wife, on the party line, drawl, “I am just wo-ahn out. I’ve been waterin’ the yahd.”
The statement might not seem significant, but my family has its own criteria for significance. And so those two sentences entered the vernacular.
They were used under a variety of circumstances: after stretching barbed wire, frying chicken, mowing the lawn.
My father would fold the newspaper, set it on the table, and announce, “I am just wo-ahn out. I’ve been waterin’ the yahd.”
I am wo-ahn out, too. I’ve been taking the Jeopardy online test.
Fifty questions, fifteen seconds to type each answer. Spelling didn’t count but was appreciated. Short answers were accepted, not in the form of a question.
I didn’t do too badly, I think. Better than last year. Last year was a mess.
I won’t include specifics, but I did okay on questions related to literature, biology, and chemistry.
But I won’t be called in for an interview. My natural distaste for geography and abject ignorance of popular culture took care of that.
Katie Who?
And there was the What’s-His-Name problem. I can see his face but–
Time is up. Proceed to the next question.
Students used to say, Why do we have to study literature? Why do we have to read Shakespeare? Beowulf? Canterbury Tales? All this stuff?
I would say, So you will know the pleasure of beautiful words and elevated thoughts. So you will understand literary allusions. So you will be culturally literate. So you will be educated.
So when you see an ad for fat-free cheese with a caption reading, A lean, not hungry, look, you will recognize the copywriter has read Julius Caesar.
Finally–finally–I came up with the right answer: You study literature so when Alex Trebec says, “The blank ‘for all his feathers, was a-cold’ you will buzz in and put the answer in the form of a question and walk away with a pile of money.
That got their attention.
I don’t know that it’s actually happened for any of them. But I fully expect to turn on the television someday and see one of my students clicking away.
It hasn’t worked for me. But that’s all right. It is the student’s job to surpass the teacher. I shall have a vicarious victory.
Now it’s almost midnight. I must post and then retire.
Because I am just wo-ahn out. I’ve been waterin’ the yahd.
Related Articles
- IBM Puts Supercomputer in ‘Jeopardy!’ (usnews.com)
- Try this, Watson! (ken-jennings.com)
Words from Dean Spanley
Two quotations from the film Dean Spanley, adapted from Lord Dunsany’s novel, My Talks with Dean Spanley:
Only the closed mind is certain.
The trouble with cats is that they have no idea of the rules.
Pantsing
I am a pantser.
I wish I could say that isn’t as bad as it sounds, but I can’t.
Pantser is one of the words I’ve learned since starting work on my novel. It means someone who writes by the seat of his pants, without an outline or other planning tools.
It’s the opposite of plotter. The plotter thinks things out before beginning. He may have a detailed outline, a timeline, character sketches, spreadsheets, charts, who knows what.
I certainly don’t know what. I’m a pantser. I start with a character, a setting, and a sentence, often a line of dialogue.
When I described my method, or lack of it, to a published writer, she was not amused.
Well, actually, she was. She laughed and told me I’d better get to outlining.
I tried. Outlining, as I’ve said before, gives me the fantods.
If I know what I’m going to write before I write it, outlining is no problem.
Some things must be planned. If I’d tried to write my master’s thesis without an outline, I’d still be sitting in front of that baby blue Smith-Corona electric typewriter, wondering where to start.
But I’d already gone through an entire year of reading, recording, scribbling, mulling over, talking to myself, boring my office mates, and engaging in various other obsessive-compulsive behaviors commonly known as pre-writing, before I typed the outline onto that official form and presented it for my adviser’s signature.
I have to approach fiction in a similar fashion. Until I know my characters–their names, their relationships, their backstories, their personalities, their likes and dislikes, their secrets, dreams, desires–I can’t outline the plot.
The only way I can know all those things is to let the characters tell me. And before they can talk to me, I have to write.
So. Knowing I’m a pantser (though the term yet), and being told I had to be a plotter, I gave plotting one more try. Then I slid into the Slough of Despond.
But for three things, I would be wallowing there still. First was an article in which mystery writer Tony Hillerman identified himself as a pantser and described how the process worked for him. It was slow, he said, but he eventually got there. If someone of Hillerman’s caliber could pants his way through novel after novel, perhaps there was hope that I could turn out one.
Second was a panelist at a meeting of the Writers’ League of Texas who said–and I quote–“I start with a character and a setting and a line of dialogue.” I was sitting in the front row that night, and when she came out with that confession, I wanted to run up and hug her.
(She also said she doesn’t plow through her first draft to the end, but periodically stops, goes back, and revises. “Sometimes,” she said, “when I get the language just right, that sparks a new idea, and I suddenly have a new path to explore.” Well, bless her heart. I do the same thing, and I’d thought that was wrong, too.)
The third thing that helped pull me from the mire was the fact that I do, in some circumstances, have the sense God promised a monkey. I knew there had to be more than one way to write a novel.
Still, the process–going where no woman has gone before without map or compass, making it up as you go along–is backward and contradictory and just plain scary. For control freaks, it can be paralyzing.
I’m a control freak. An impatient control freak. I want to do it right the first time, and I want to do it right now.
When I recently confessed to another writer that I’d been stalled for a while, she said, “Why?”
At least a half-dozen things have contributed to my inertia, but for the most part it comes down to the desire to control. And poor memory. And impatience. And lack of faith.
I forget that the surest way to get unstuck is to relax and let the story tell itself.
When I find myself so tangled up in words that all I can do is talk about how tangled up I am, I head for the bookstore. This time I came out with Jane Vandenburgh’s The Architecture of the Novel.
It’s a good book. It says, as I knew it would, to relax and let the story tell itself.
But Vandenburgh goes further. The story knows how to tell itself and it will find its own plot. First, write scenes–no backstory, no memory, no flashbacks, no thinking, no summary, no cause and effect, no consequences, no chapters, no sequencing, no beginning or ending. All those things belong to plot. Structure belongs to plot. No why—why belongs to plot.
Just tell what happens, be a witness, a noticer, a sensate camera.
I spent over an hour today reading Chapter 2, slowly, taking notes. I wanted to rush–Confession: I’ve had the book for nearly a month, and I’ve rushed through it several times and come out with nothing. It’s not a book to be hurried. I made myself read, think, record. I made myself sit in a coffee shop for over an hour, reading,thinking, recording.
It was like being in school again.
Tomorrow I’ll type up my notes, read the chapter again, push away the compulsion to move on to Chapter 3.
Chapter 3 is about plot. I’m not ready for that yet.
First I have to go back to pantsing, this time bare bones, telling the story in scenes stripped of backstory and digression and what Vandenburgh calls beautiful language. I have to relax and let the story tell itself.
How will that work with my need to get the language just right in order to spark new ideas?
I have no idea. The question makes me, quite frankly, a little queasy.
Image by BBODO at en.wikipedia [Public domain or Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons
M. K. Waller 