Writing's a Garden, Dig It?

Writing a book is like preparing a meal, if you had to plant the seeds for every ingredient and nurture them to grow. Lucky for all of us, it takes less time to cook spaghetti.

The first step for any project is an idea, and those come in different forms. A concept is like choosing your meal, whether it’s spaghetti, chocolate poundcake, an alien invasion, or epic adventure. From there, you simply need to decide which ingredients (genre tropes) you’ll stay faithful to and which you’ll vary from. In my case, the initial idea was more of a detail, a segment of a scene without any context. Consider that more of an ingredient. You may not know what dish you want, but it definitely needs to have tomato sauce, chocolate, a psychologist slammed to a wall, or a disgruntled princess. Concepts and details are both great jumping off points, and you have to start somewhere.

In my “patient farmer” metaphor, you then need to grow those ingredients. To do that, you’ll need to prepare the squishy, gelatinous ground where you’ll plant them. How that’s done depends on you. Like echolocation, you try different activities until you feel the pulse of that creative spark and head in that direction. It might be yoga or prayer. Long, quiet walks or ones with Layne Staley wailing through your ear buds.

For me, it’s menial tasks and music. Give me a mindless chore, and I’ll turn it into either a concept or a detail. Washing dishes. Mowing the lawn. Taking a shower. Walking the dog. Anything that allows you to tune out and tap into that creative nook inside your head. With music, any time I hear a song that puts me in the world of my story, it goes into a playlist (the one for my current work in progress sits at 70 tracks now). When there are enough, I keep it on constant rotation. It makes for a relatively effortless slide back into wherever I left off, even after days away from the laptop.

Where the analogy falls apart is with knowing when your story plant is ready to be harvested. You can see when a tomato is ripe or spinach ready to pick, but timing the start of a first draft is more subjective. I base my first drafts on the general three-act structure I learned about in ninth grade (Introduction, Rising Action, Conclusion). Once I have a major plot point for each act, I begin connecting them. For The Road Cain Walks, which I talked about in my previous post, I was more of a “plotter,” someone who outlines the major details in a story before they start writing. There’s nothing wrong with doing it that way or “pantsing,” which is sitting down without any real idea of where the story is heading. My way is somewhere in between the two. Call me a moderate.

This part of the process can be pretty daunting, especially when you struggle with where to start, but it gets easier. You’re flexing muscles most people never use, so of course they’ll be stiff. There’s a quote out there I have no clue who to attribute it to that says, “Details create details.” The more you have, the more will come. In the course of the six novels I currently have at various draft stages, I’ve accumulated 67 other ideas. Some are ready to go as soon as I clear the current queue. Others are concepts I’ll develop in time. All of them descended from that very first inkling of a plot point.

That’s it for this week, but I’ll continue discussing the first draft in my next post, including advice for the days, weeks, and months it takes to get your story on the page. I’ve also posted the next chapter of the first draft of The Road Cain Walks, which may not be an every week thing. My only copy of the files is on an iMac disk, and I left Apple behind soon after I finished the novel. If any of you know of a good (and preferably free) software to convert iMac-era files to modern-day Windows, please let me know in the comments. For now, I’m posting the chapters within the actual blog because I haven’t figured out how to create a separate page for them. Anyone with advice about that, feel free to comment as well.

Until next time…