The Romance of Lichen on Boulders in Relationship to History

When Dave the Cat took me for a walk this morning, he sat on a large boulder in a field by our drive. This boulder is gigantic, worn by the weather of millions of years, full of cracks where plants have taken root. There is even a juniper starting to grow from one of these cracks and there is, here and there, the dried up spongy green moss, brown now, at least until we get a rain when it will spring to life again. There is also a small crust of orange lichen. I was reading a while back, this particular lichen is very slow growing - takes about one hundred years just to grow a square inch. By my rough visual reckoning, I date this to about 1660. This lichen was starting to grow when Charles 11 was restored to the throne, during the plague in London and the Great Fire. The old London Bridge still existed with the tarred heads of traitors and highwaymen stuck on posts above the gate at Southwark. This is the time and place of my novel. The real Jonet Howat was presumbably freed from the tollbooth cell in 1663. Two years earlier, her mother, also accused of witchcraft in Forfar, Scotland was executed. All this happened when 3000 miles across the sea in a largely undiscovered wilderness the lichen on a boulder in my field was starting to grow. It doesn't mean anything. In the mornings, I think too much and dwell on things like the romance of lichen on boulders in relationship to history. Just sayin'.

The True Story

I'm writing fiction, but if you want to read the true story of the Forfar Witches there is plenty of info on the net and one book by a Forfar historian.

The Plausibility Factor (thinking out loud)

I have my protagonist as a Shakespeare quotin', intelligent, witty, stubborn young women living in the 17th Century. However, from the age of thirteen to seventeen, she was in a tollbooth cell in Forfar, Scotland, having been accused of witchcraft. Her mother, among others, was executed - strangled and burnt to ashes in a barrel of tar. Now, how do I make this character a Shakespeare quotin', intelligent, witty, stubborn young women? Is is plausible considering this history? Well, I don't know. Certainly good writing can make it so, but for a first novel, am I asking too much of myself? I'm stalled.

How do I make myself believe my character? Oh, I can justify how she knows Shakespeare. I can justify her intelligence and wit. But would she have those traits? Four years is a hell of a long time for a young girl. She lost most of her youth to a dark cell. She would be malnourished among other things - certainly that could affect her thinking.

Hmm, second-guessing is painful. I have to fix this.

Blog Beginnings

I'm writing a novel. I can actually say it now and mean it. I wrote a prologue a year ago, hoping it would take me somewhere. It didn't, but I was happy with the prose regardless. So, not wanting to give up again, I wrote the first chapter and it stalled too. In the words of Miss O'Hara, "Where will I go? What will I do?"

I joined a writer's community and I can't tell you how grateful I am. Turns out, you don't have to write the first chapter first. You can hop about the story like a rabbit, writing scenes anywhere in the wip (work-in-progress). The story begins to tell itself, eventually one scene meeting up with the other, shaking hands and patting each other on the back. It's exhilarating. Some writers call it "writing in chunks" or "chunk writing". When I think of the word chunks, I think about throwing up, so I prefer to call it "writing in fragments". Sits better in my belly.

I can write one thousand words a day or more when Fritz isn't hovering or Dave the Cat isn't sitting on the keyboard. The next several days I'll spend fiddling with the scene, tweaking, editing, preening, adding salt or sugar to taste. I love this part - finding words and phrases to show visuals, emotion, ways to move the story forward by saying a lot or a little. (Less is more) It's the joy of writing and the pleasure of knowing the final result works .... well, works for the moment. Things change however, when you write a scene placed much later in the work and realize you've already said such and such in a scene coming earlier. Now you have to go back and fix such and such to make so and so work, thus urging you to tweak. I love to tweak, so I'm not bothered by these foibles.

Back to the thousand words a day thing. Yes, it's doable. If I just wrote and wrote and worried about the tweaking at the end of the novel, once all the various scenes fused themselves together, I could finish a 100k novel in three months, but it would be really, really bad. Lots of writers do it and don't mess with anything until "The End" is typed at the bottom of the last page. Every writer eventually finds their way. Every writer has a different process and there are no rules, other than owning a copy of Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White and keeping beside the computer. (No, I have no financial interest in the book, just interest in general )

Therein lieth my first post.