[Caelum's Scrapbook] Use Your Words.

[Caelum]

This just happened in my gchat. friend: bwaha. this story is infinitely more southern-accented in my head because you sent a guy named Darrell me: trust me. he is everything you imagine a southern dude named darrell to be too. friend: amazing me: a couple of years ago he swaggered up to my desk and said, "Katie, did you know we're relations?" and he was right. I about died. friend: woah me: relations if him being the brother of my now ex sister in law's half sister’s husband counts. so, like, three marriages connect us. friend: I think you level up in Georgian for that sentence. this is why you're my favorite me: because of my inescapable hickdom? friend: it’s more that you’re hilarious. me: and true.

[Taylani]

I stopped at the name "Darrel"...cause I flashed completely to the Walking dead..

[Caelum]

A note on writing styles. Really, it’s more of a mixed note on a number of things. I am wading through a sea of work projects and holiday family social mania. In addition to this, I have a personal project I’m in full out war with. It’s been a terrible two months with it. I feel I’ve had to fight for every paragraph and am exhausted by the time I’m through. This has felt even more ridiculous considering that it’s NaNo month. I am smack in the middle of the story. The world is built up in the west, act one of the plot is complete. Protagonists introduced. Setting largely set. Exhibits of average days produced. Boom, inciting incident. Enter chaos. Fun time, right? Wrong. Usually I love second acts. There is something disgustingly compelling about the steady build and hasty backslides of plot progress. I like to watch them scrabble. I like to force them to fight, make them do and not just be done at. I want to drop a revelation on their heads and bring them to the depths of despair because, I mean, that’s how writers get their kicks – making made up people miserable. This time the second act is slaughtering me. That’s not the way things are supposed to go. Finally, in a moment of truly dramatic desperation, I flailed at one of my writer friends and whined. A lot. I mean, a lot. I also drank a lot of wine. That’s a different story. Anyway, the end result was that I remembered I have never been a gardener. And here, in this book, I’m trying very hard to be. And that’s just stupid. What I mean is better expressed below. I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they're going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there's going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows. And I'm much more a gardener than an architect. - George R.R. Martin. Like the Decemberists said: “And I am nothing of a builder, but here I dreamt I was an architect.” Wanting to be, trying to be, a gardener does me no favors for the lengthy projects. I can cast seeds all I want for the short term things, but for the big ones once I get to the middle and discover that it’s all muddy I get lost in the bog. And then I stop writing. Time to get out of the dirt and draw a few of those rooms to scale. k.

[Taylani]

The only thing that I don't really like about the quote is they make being the "gardener" type of writer as if it is the lazy, accidental type writer. As if the occasion that a Gardener type writer gets a really great story out it was just dumb luck.

I guess I found it a bit put offing because of the two I tend to think of myself as the gardener type. I don't plan out my plots, my characters, my climaxes or my endings. I, instead drop a seed and then let it develop. Then it is a matter of nuturing the seed and not over working it, and not trying to force it into one path of growth that it is not naturally falling.

[Eida]

I don't agree that it says you are lazy. You still dig the hole, you still plant it, you still water it but you let it be after it. Wait it to bloom but you still take care of it, give it love. I'm more a gardener type too because I like when my own character suprises me and I like to let her go with the flow. I think if you take care of that plant well, you'll get as big as if you would be an architect. Of course you need more time for that.

Both of them has its own advantages and neither is a wrong choice I think! That was an interesting and very great quote Katie!

Stay shiney and... shiney! Caelum will be the New Sun that way!

[Taylani]

hehe is why I think I was reading it from a colored perspective

[Caelum]

That’s really kind of funny that you mention that, Taylani, because I totally came away from it thinking that it made the gardener type look way better than the architect. Not lazy, no, rather somehow more creative and/or talented. Personally, I don’t think one is better than the other. Both can be awesome and both can sometimes be less than awesome. I also know that people can be both depending on the project and situation, one person in particular I know leaps to mind. As a playwright, she’s completely a gardener. As a novelist, she’s an architect. My problem? I wanted very much to be a gardener on this project, but found out that was not going to work for me. I didn't mean being a gardener is stupid, but that me trying to be against what was better for my personal style was stupid.

[Taylani]

*grins* I don't think one is better then the other either, though I feel a bit overwhelmed when I try to be the architect type. As much as I am always plotting my plots are never more then mere skeletons. I do wish I could be more structured because it would make my solo's a lot better written imo.

I am amused that we both came away with opposite view points on the quote

[Caelum]

Don't drink and drive, ya'll. Just don't. Ever. I'm going to use this as my outlet tonight. I went to bed earlier, but the crack in my heart drove me back out of bed to do a little pacing. I snuggled with my cat and was so anxious I even considered jumping on the treadmill for an indoor run this late. I decided to write out what of it I could instead. My old failsafe. This isn't a story. The way I talk about things that are bothering me in my bones tend to find story-shapes and voices in better, bigger words than the base of my brain that is usually doing the emitting of emotions can understand. This time it isn't going to be eloquent or make an attempt at backstory and flow. I'm sitting here on my sofa in PJs with a full belly and a slightly busted heart. I'm not really in the mood to concern myself with audience reception and whether there were ten typos in the previous paragraph. I grew up next door to a family with four children in ages ranging around me. We were never tight friends, but we walked our dogs together and went to holiday parties and footballs parties and just those random sort of parties people throw when the Georgia heat seeps into your blood and makes you a little crazy. We live on a barrier island that fifty years ago was little more than farm land and hogs and has churned into water logged suburbia where slick talking lawyers buy their toilet paper in line when the shrimper in a dying industry. When I lived away and came back home on a Christmas in college I ran into five people I knew just stopping at the gas station on my last broke-ass leg to my mama's house. One of them was an ex boyfriend. When my brother lost his best childhood friend to a vicious battle with cancer in his early twenties and, a month later, idiotically ran his car into a live oak out of alcohol fueled grief, these were the people who carried pie plates to me at four in the morning when they saw me coming home from the hospital on the first long watch waiting for the specialist team from Emory to land. But this isn't a story and, even if it was, it wouldn't be the story about my brother. Mama called me while I taking my grandmother's cornbread dressing out the oven to tell me that Joey was dead. He was the oldest son of those neighbors, a tall, good looking man of thirty-five who was having a little trouble and spent too much time up at the island bar. He'd been smart. He did the right thing when he left the bar last night a few too many drinks in and he left his car in the parking lot to walk the two miles stretch home in the cold. If this was a story, then the inciting incident would be the young woman who was about five years behind me at school. She didn't do the smart thing, and she didn't leave her car in the parking lot. Instead she drove and she hit my neighbor who was walking and then I can only imagine she lost her mind a little in shock and panic and alcohol and she drove away. Somebody else found Joey in the dead hours of the night, and he was already gone. His parents are driving home. They may already be back. His mother dissolved on the ride and his father was so scared for her that he pulled off the highway and drove her straight to a hospital for a sedative or a cure for a completely busted heart. God alone knows. People make a lot of mistakes in life, and young people tend to make a lot more. My brother made a mistake like that once and it was little more than luck and undiluted grace that allowed it to be resolved without the loss of any lives. I've heard words today like "senseless" and "awful" and I've also heard words patterned into prayer shapes not just for the victim and his family but for the girl and hers. That helped to restore a little my faith in man. So maybe this is a story, and I'll conclude it after all. Don't drink and drive. Don't take your family, those of the blood and those of choosing, for granted. I know I hugged my own family an awful lot tonight.

[Taylani]

That is a harsh lesson to learn that way. Both for her, and his family who has to try and find a way to move on and to forgive. I don't know the young man obviously, but I do understand the loss his family is dealing with. I also understand the emotions you are also wrestling with, thank you for sharing and I hope that you find some measure of peace.