Losing the Plot and a Different Sort of Challenge: Walking?!
Okay.
A month in (back at writing) and I'm beginning to lose the plot.
I'm not finding any difficulty writing. My characters and scenes are alive, even after the first draft and before I edit, but I don't have a story. I have pictures of characters in places, but don't know what's happening in the sense of where a story ends. Is this part and parcel of being a "panster"?
I don't know.
Can't remember?
Excuse me for thinking aloud as I write this blog. In the past - as I vaguely recall - my form of pantstering was actually knowing the end and beginning of a piece; I just didn't what happened in-between or how we (myself and all the characters I had yet to be introduced to) got from start to the finish. The middle revealed details as I wrote, but I had quite clear anchor points at either end to keep me going in the right direction. At the moment I'm just writing from a beginning, or a point that feels like a beginning, and I have no idea where I'm going or why. I'm circling in place and finding it difficult now.
How did I used to do this?
What's different?
Walks...
I used to walk a lot.
Every day, across English countryside, through woodland, over Iron Age forts, by Roman tracks, and graffiti-laden bridges. I watched a changing of the seasons and marvelled at the fauna and flora, the incredible changes one sees every day. Magpies, ravens, red kites, squirrels, oak and elm, fern, bramble, ancient hollows and birdsong were a daily experience. I even enjoyed the detritus of man: the lost shoe being overtaken by weeds, burnt out cars, and the whoosh of intercity trains as I watched from bridge or footpath; the slow me, a juxtaposition to those fleeting faces on carriages hurtling to and from a never-ending race and the vibrancy of London. But I've been particularly reclusive of late, and by late I mean the last five or six years.
Indeed, this year I've been out and about on my own - for pleasure rather than picking someone up from an airport or train station, collecting medications, or doing a simple errand - maybe twice. Sitting here now, trying to write and circling in place, I'm beginning to think I need to walk again. This is a bit different to when I fell ill though as I was already walking daily. The writing I started then to try and help quicker heal a broken mind and its concentration. And the writing worked, or certainly helped, as my tool for healing. Since then - during Covid and all that - my walking stopped and never really got going again; other than an occasional and rare outing here and there.
Thinking on it now, sitting writing this blog, I suppose walking was a part of the writing process. Or at least part of my writing process. It got me away from everything - television, radio, people, chatter, the computer and phone, internet, social media - to a place where the peace and quiet of the countryside, of nature, gave an inner child and forgotten imagination freedom and space to play properly; focus on a story without intrusive external distraction. I think then maybe - no not maybe, definitely - this old recluse NEEDS to make himself go out - just for a daily walk - so as to find my next story and its anchor points. Then I can write with purpose.
So that will be my writing challenge this week:
A daily walk in the countryside.
And this,
I can assure you,
Will be much harder than it seems.
Oh gods, wish me luck...
If I survive, there will be photos like this one:
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