Salad Days
2nd Nov. Spring, early summer, and the bees rise early to fly out after the first nectar as the flowers open. And then in their twos and threes they land on my pool to drink and drown. It is now midmorning, but earlier my wake-up swim was broken by a dozen rescue operations, scooping up another bee onto a small piece of bark and tossing it onto the brick paving before it could walk off the other side and back into the water. And then distracting Lilycat until the bee had whizzed its wings dry enough and flown away. Now, with coffee in hand, and my mind going to the strawberries I left forgotten in the frig, I watch lazy bees hover round the mouths of the bell-shaped bindweed flowers fringing the oleander tree above me. There are three flowers, pale lilac, in a raged lacy curtain of those elegant leaves. The leaves are perfectly formed, overlapping like a screen-printed image, letting the blue sky through in the negative spaces between their own pattern of bright green/strong green forms. Their veins are drawn in golden light. Dark stems snake eloquently through the whole, making a repeating vertical pattern that punctuates and unites the whole.
Writing: I am writing my novel, and it is flowing well. I am starting to think of writing as a three tiered process. When I write a short story, I do these processes at once, without really thinking about it. But the novel requires something else. My mental model is a 3D naughts-and-crosses game. The first layer is the seeds: the energy of an idea, a passion, an unexplored sense of something that drives me into an engagement with images, language, possibilities. The second is Springtime: what happens when I immerse myself in this with energy, time and imagination and participate in the writing process to explore its unconscious potential. The third is the gardener: when I then bring structure, skills, a critical mind, a wider vision, becoming the gardener working with the growing plants of my story.
I imagine that with practice these areas flow into each other organically, and the movement from one to the other becomes more skilled and effective. The more the gardener can have appropriate input in the preparation of soil, choice of seeds and their scattering, and the balance of water, sun, slugpellets and mulch, the more the whole thing runs itself and the less energy/growth etc is wasted. But the gardener can also trample plants underfoot, pull out the wanted with the weeds, and disturb the plants so much they do not grow.
There is movement within each level, from story-element to story element, and there is movement vertically, between levels, from process to process. But it has to remain organic: too much artificial fertilizer kills.
In writing my NaNoWriMo (write a novel in November)novel, I first sat down and planned out a synopsis, a shortened outline of the story step by step. Some bits I wrote as simple scenes, some as named events to be developed as simple scenes.
But I have found myself wanting to generate whole new areas I hadn't realised were part of the story (which is fine) and also balking at writing scenes or events I had thought were fundamental. I write these, but there is no energy in them. I find myself picking up new expanded areas, and writing them as synopsis, ie about the story instead of writing the story itself. And I guess that's ok too: it doesn't all have to develop at the same pace. Because this reminds me a novel is 4D not 3D: time is a factor too, it is a process of developing the whole through developing all of the planes through all of the levels.
So I am learning what preparation and structure help me personally write, and what doesn't. I am reminded of Sue Woolfe's Wild Writing workshop. She recommended taking a whole heap of fragments of writing, find out who you write, and make conglomeratecharacters, what your main motifs are, and what your passions are, and chopping it all up into these component parts and then starting with these as the bare bones. That is what I will do next NaNoWriMo.
Writing: I am writing my novel, and it is flowing well. I am starting to think of writing as a three tiered process. When I write a short story, I do these processes at once, without really thinking about it. But the novel requires something else. My mental model is a 3D naughts-and-crosses game. The first layer is the seeds: the energy of an idea, a passion, an unexplored sense of something that drives me into an engagement with images, language, possibilities. The second is Springtime: what happens when I immerse myself in this with energy, time and imagination and participate in the writing process to explore its unconscious potential. The third is the gardener: when I then bring structure, skills, a critical mind, a wider vision, becoming the gardener working with the growing plants of my story.
I imagine that with practice these areas flow into each other organically, and the movement from one to the other becomes more skilled and effective. The more the gardener can have appropriate input in the preparation of soil, choice of seeds and their scattering, and the balance of water, sun, slugpellets and mulch, the more the whole thing runs itself and the less energy/growth etc is wasted. But the gardener can also trample plants underfoot, pull out the wanted with the weeds, and disturb the plants so much they do not grow.
There is movement within each level, from story-element to story element, and there is movement vertically, between levels, from process to process. But it has to remain organic: too much artificial fertilizer kills.
In writing my NaNoWriMo (write a novel in November)novel, I first sat down and planned out a synopsis, a shortened outline of the story step by step. Some bits I wrote as simple scenes, some as named events to be developed as simple scenes.
But I have found myself wanting to generate whole new areas I hadn't realised were part of the story (which is fine) and also balking at writing scenes or events I had thought were fundamental. I write these, but there is no energy in them. I find myself picking up new expanded areas, and writing them as synopsis, ie about the story instead of writing the story itself. And I guess that's ok too: it doesn't all have to develop at the same pace. Because this reminds me a novel is 4D not 3D: time is a factor too, it is a process of developing the whole through developing all of the planes through all of the levels.
So I am learning what preparation and structure help me personally write, and what doesn't. I am reminded of Sue Woolfe's Wild Writing workshop. She recommended taking a whole heap of fragments of writing, find out who you write, and make conglomeratecharacters, what your main motifs are, and what your passions are, and chopping it all up into these component parts and then starting with these as the bare bones. That is what I will do next NaNoWriMo.
posted by Jessica Vivien | 4:41 PM
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