Trellising

I started drafting another novel, this time looking at actually starting off a series. I’m still revising Rail Corridor, but I gotta start something in the pipeline next to it or I get restless. Last time that happened, I signed up to run a café at a campsite.

So, I’m getting the scaffolding set up for my story. No, that’s not right. I’m trellising for my story. If I were to be scaffolding the story, I would be establishing the framework to surround the work. Upon completion of the work, the scaffolding is removed, leaving behind only the freestanding work. It doesn’t feel like the work I’m doing here is anywhere near temporary, so I don’t want to call this scaffolding.

By the time there’s a woven and bound skeleton of willow twigs that arches over the pathway, with curves and whorls in its design, branches resolving … there will be vines snaking up it. Not berries, I’m pretty sure. We have a few too many thorny berries here. No, I’m thinking pea plants. And beans. I’d plant squash at the base, too. If some of the willow staves are still green, they, too, can become a part of the trellis as a living component.

So what makes this different from architecture? you ask. I’m assuming a lot of folks are familiar with George R. R. Martin’s “architect or gardener” metaphor. In the case of a trellis, it’s architecture that serves your garden. I’m not drawing blueprints, but I’m laying out the easiest routes, simplifying their traversal. With a garden, your living story is already beginning to wind its way into the lowest staves of your trellis as you add the higher ranks. If you’ve wound your staves well, and there are thinner ones near the peak… well, the garden will improvise. If you feel like adding to the skeleton, you can weave some additional twigs into the arch.

Anywhere you’ve built, the garden finds it easier to grow. If you can guide how you want the story to take shape, even just in providing somewhere for that story to latch onto, you can start to help it along. It’ll still wander, but you can keep it mostly corralled. This metaphor is imperfect; maybe a storm strikes and knocks apart your trellis, casting the story in a new direction.

I came around to this question when I wanted to answer the #WritersCoffeeClub question for today: “Are you a pantser or a plotter? Have you always been this way? What brought you here?” and in response saw a remark comparing these to Martin’s gardener/architect divide.

I’d say, I’m more the gardener than the architect. If a character’s motivations wander from what I thought initially, or in a prior draft, well, that’s okay. I’m finding myself moving conversations around–keeping them almost intact, but realizing that they’re just in the wrong place, fundamentally, and I wanted the action to just. Keep. Moving. Also, since I wrote this draft without revising at all along the way, I’m already trying to stake out the locations that I’ll need to rework for internal consistency.

I keep a journal, you see, but it’s not always the most accurate source, and I’m sometimes lazy about recording things. I’ll stop to do a full read after this and just mark up that copy completely with notes. I can’t revise and journal at the same time, because these revisions right now feel like I’m writing anew, retracing the original path, and sometimes drifting much farther out. It’s fun. It’s rewarding, also, because I can feel how much I’ve loosened up my style and how much I can adopt my characters’ voices in the ways they see things―interpret things, too.

In a way, revisions feel like a second growth atop the first. Second flush, maybe. I should go tend my garden.