answers waiting for the question to be asked & the end of the dogwoods

When we’re watching or reading a story that isn’t working, before we give up in disgust, questions start going through our heads. Why is he (the character) doing that? What does this mean? How did she do that? What about XYZ that you said in chapter 2? WTF?

As I’m doing the revision on this novel, I try to find those places in the story where I, as a reader, ask those very questions. But the cool thing about being the writer, too, is that I get to answer them.

Actually, that’s a lie. I have no freaking idea where the answers come from. I ask the questions, and the answers (usually) just show up. As if they were always there. Say you want to know the history of, oh, I don’t know, porkchops. You google, you check out wikipedia, and there you go, the answer. Ask, how did that character learn to do that, and the answer is there, as if it always existed, just like the pork chops. You scratch some paint off an old wall, find some interesting wall paper under there, and then more layers of designs and histories, then plaster, then a doorway into another dimension. Just start scratching the surface of the story, asking questions–that’s the thing, asking the questions!–and stuff shows up to fill the gap.

(Except when it doesn’t. Which really sucks and involves much head banging and the sweating of blood.)

But mostly, it works. I don’t know why. Where does this stuff come from? I am really, really curious about that. Is it the same part of the brain, or soul maybe, that dreams come from? I don’t mean that in a flighty, moon-eyed way, but really, the dreams we have at night, those pictures that come in our heads that more or less, depending on the night, come as stories–do the stories I write come from the same place? Because mostly, it isn’t me. Not the me that walks around and goes grocery shopping and tries to remember to buy shampoo. Where do the answers live before I thought to ask the question?

Okay, enough of that. Here is a picture of the last part of dogwood season. I tried and tried to get a shot of the petals falling–the wind blows and they fill the air, giant, sweet smelling feathers. But no luck. You’ll have to settle for this shot of the polka dotted ground. It only lasts a couple of days–very beautiful!