How Does Your Garden Grow?

Order and chaos have been on my mind lately.

What, you too?

See, I've been thinking about writing methods, because last week on Word Whores was all about pre-plotting versus misting through a novel and this week is about writing rituals, or lack thereof.

What I'm discovering is that these things have a whole lot to do with how we set up the rest of our lives. This should be no surprise to me. I'm a fan of tesseract theory and how a small piece of one thing reflects the overall thing. I've talked before about how the structure of one day can be the pattern of your entire life. (This is an over-time concept, so don't panic if you just had a nothing day.) So it makes sense that your overall life affects the pattern of a single day.

We all plan our lives differently. We have different amounts of pre-plotting or misting to our days. Some of us have structure thrust upon us in the form of jobs that require us to be behind our desks from x o'clock to y-thirty. Some jobs change daily and, though you might apply a tentative structure in the form of To-Do lists, this can change completely depending on phone calls and what hits the In-Box. I expect we find our way to jobs that suit us this way. I love my day job for an environmental consulting firm because all that matters is the quality of my work and that I meet deadlines. No one particularly cares what the clock says when my butt is in the chair, just so long as I get the work done and get it done well.

This suits me. I had one of those "be there from x o'clock to y-thirty" jobs before and hated it.

A friend of mine once told me she'd read a psych study that showed that people with very orderly internal lives have wild and disorderly gardens. Likewise, people with more chaotic internal lives tend to produce orderly gardens. She said this while looking at my untamed cottage garden. The photo above shows my usual gardening style, though we'd only been in that house a few years and I hadn't had time to completely convert it to a jungle-tangle. If I were to show you a picture of my friend's garden, you would see her neatly bordered rows, with bunches of plants set an exact distance apart. Very pleasing to the eye.

I was forever wanting to sneak over and plant a stray something in the wrong spot.

At any rate, I've discovered that, though I'm an orderly person in many ways: ritualistic about my days, methodical in scientific work and my love for spreadsheets is near legendary, there's another side of me that loves to fling order to the winds and embrace chaos.

I may never plot simply because I love the wildness of an unplanned novel. Oh yeah, later I'll go back and thin it out here and there, tweak the plantings for maximum effect.

But first I'm tossing my seeds into the wind. Just to see what I get.

Full Moon on the Rise

I'm taking a plotting class.

For the second time now. Not as in, I flunked the first time so I have to take it again to get a passing grade for my major. That was Immunology. Why Immunology among all those hard-core pre-med courses I took? I have no idea. No one knows which heel is the one that didn't get sufficiently dipped, I suppose.

No, this is a different online plotting class that I'm trying because I keep feeling like I should learn how to plot better.

And no, this has never been feedback on my book, that the plot has to be stronger. I think I have this idea that if I learn to plot, everything will be much easier. See, the RWA folks are all about plotting vs. pantsing. In fact, they ask you that after they ask your name and where you're from at receptions. The first time someone asked me, I couldn't even figure out what word they were saying. "Pantser" is a person who writes by the seat of her pants, rather than plotting out the story ahead of time.

I'm not fond of the term, frankly.

I dropped out of the first plotting class because I hated it so much. They had us start with loglines, which is basically your pitch line. "A beautiful young girl, abused by her family, sneaks into a dance where she captures the heart of the local charming ruler. Afraid that he'll spurn her once he discovers her base origins, she flees, forcing him to search for her so they might live happily ever after."

That kind of thing.

And my deal is, I don't know how you can know what the story is about until I write it. Writing for me is a process of discovery. I write essays the same way. And these blog posts. You can probably tell that half the time I don't know what my point is. I start with an image or an idea and talk about it for a while. Sometimes I make it to a point, sometimes I don't.

When I *do* find a point, it's a wonderful moment. My friend, Craig Arnold, now a dead poet, which he might actually find kind of amusing, taught me a way to think of it. I think it was the Chinese, he said, who talk about the moment the poem "opens its eyes."

I live for that moment. Which I suppose makes me a crazy writer, even if not a cinematically worthy one.

Starting with the logline is, to me, like starting with the moment the story opens its eyes. Which feels fundamentally wrong and backwards, like I'm jumping to the end without having earned it.

Like all ventures that can end in a thrilling reward, there's also doubt and fear. Which is probably why I keep thinking I should learn to plot. Just in case. So I started a second class. And we're starting with loglines. I'll give it a few more days.

Prophylactic heel-dipping, as it were.