GREEN!

is the color of my envy when I read Juliette Wade's entry of today on how she manages plot complexity (and "jinx" please!), the sort that makes me snort and mutter: "sure, that how *you* do it," in the same tone I would mutter "Well, who wants a fire-engine red car without no fixed roof anyway". Not that I'm a car buff or anything, even if I'm not an idiot techwise. Cars are things with wheels that get you places, and that's sort of where it ends. Though, I do love my little Yaris, hm... Well, it's complex, in a lacking a penis way, I guess. Anyways, cars have nothing to do with Juliette Wade's entry.

I'm envious of people who can plot before they start. Or even those who plot while they write. Plotting is the territory of Cow Watcher, always nattering on no matter what I do. Like a thread on your pullover hanging loose: you know you should leave it well enough alone, but before you know it you have a ball of yarn and no pullover. With echoes of Bauhaus' In The Flat Field* playing on the background.

What she notes as point 1 (a written, pretty vague outline) and 2 (worldbuilding) happen inextricably while I'm writing. Quite annoying, because I have to try and figure out what goes where and why it would be better if X gets killed *after* Y makes a decision at the same time of typing words and words and some more words. In between I scribble something down; my writing notes are messy heaps of paper with post-its all over the place and little scraps of grocery bills I used to quickly note something down on while out of the house and not sensibly equipped for writing. This MO involves lots of Oooh! and Aaah! and Excellent! (with the requisite hand-wringing and evil grinning) from which I derive my basic writing pleasure, which is probably why I'm loathe to change it.

On the other hand, the complete clutter I end up with leads me to bouts of basic writing despair and lots of pouting at the computer screen.

But to tell the truth, I've always been a gall of clutter. Seriously, you should talk to my mother! Or the hubby, because things haven't changed that much. Most of the time when I lose things, after all these years of practice at clutter-free life, is when I'm forced to clean up the mess. As a kid, everything had its place in my disorder, and whatever you needed that was supposedly somewhere in my room (did you take the big kitchen scissors?), I could hand you within five seconds with a satisfied grin on my face. Untangling plotlines gives me the same weird fulfillment.

Cleaning up a plot (hey, I've come a long way to acknowledge that sometimes, yes, cleaning is a good thing!) is a somewhat delicate mission for me. Too much cleaning will confuse my sense of the storyline. How many times haven't I lost something after I cleaned up and put it in a very logical place! And, Cow Watcher makes it impossible to stick to an outline, and rewriting outline after outline without actually getting to the writing is ... silly. Silly silly si-ley. But it doesn't change the fact that it also makes me frumple my face and mutter in envy.


* where's the string that Theseus laid, find me out this labyrinth pla-ha-hace