Tending the Garden

I'm not a recognised writer, a published writer, I don't even know if I'm a good writer, but if I can learn enough about the craft of writing, I imagine I can become one or all of these things. To that end, I've been watching Brandon Sanderson's writing lectures on |YouTube| and have discovered that I'm a gardner.

  I'm going to assume that that doesn't mean I would be more successful tending plants than writing novels, but that's the way I write. I create things as I go and then come back later to edit or add.

  This leaves one important question: Where do I start?

Is it obvious? :\

  I know this question is probably one that people would normally ask themselves as they are about to embark on a project, rather than after a couple of attempts, but I couldn't help but think about it as I sat down to write this post; how do I know what I'm about to write?

  I suppose it's a little easier when it comes to blogging. Your blog has a purpose and your language will develop from that, but when it comes to writing a poem or a novel, there has to be some kind of trigger point that will get the ball rolling.

  I looked at my two most progessed works and realised that I had started each of them with a single sentence or idea.

"Amelie was different but she didn't know why."

  This has been revised a couple of times. It led to a character who was withdrawn but in touch with things most people couldn't see. I realised she wasn't strong enough to carry an entire novel on her own early on, so I've added another character with her who has subsequently become the primary protagonist.

  From this humble line, I churned out a first draft in the space of a couple of months that I'm currently slogging through to make readable.

"As I was running from St. Ives..."

  Don't ask me where this one came from. I was standing in my kitchen one afternoon and this line appeared in my head. It wouldn't go away, so I sat in front of my computer and started writing.

  "As I was running from St. Ives, I met a cat with seven lives..." and the rest built from there.

Now I get it!

  How can two simple lines build to something greater? Well, the ideas the line presents are what makes them work. I've probably had dozens of other forgotten lines because there was no hook in them to get me thinking about what they mean. What made Amelie different? Was it just how she felt about herself? Was she better than other people? Did she have a disability? (I'm getting the impression she might be on the Autism Spectrum: I'll have to do some serious research before I commit to that.)

  Why was "I" running from St. Ives? How did the cat lose it's other two lives? How did "I" know the cat only had seven lives? Is it a talking cat? Oh! This is a children's fantasy, maybe...

  I've taken to carrying a notebook everywhere I go, in case another inspirational quote bothers my head. It is painfully blank (Yeuch!), but I hope to fill it with inspiration as time progresses. Who knows, maybe one day it will contain the first line of a bestseller.