This morning I laid out brekkies for my daughter. She has an early morning swimming lesson (What? 9 IS early, for summer!) and I had to run upstairs and change, lest I end up at the pool in my jammies again. (What? Like you never wore your jammies to the pool.)Anyway, I set out milk, cereal, (sugar kind cuz it's summer and I'm a pushover) bowl and a spoon. I set the spoon in the bowl, but within a couple of steps I turned back and laid it next to the bowl. Cuz seriously, you know what was going to happen? She was going to pour the milk in and it would splash off the spoon onto the table and everything else.
That's the kind of attention to detail that mommies have, almost unthinking, 27/7/365, right? Who was going to be cleaning up that milk, dog? Not the 8 year old.
I realize it's how I'm approaching my stories. I do a hell of a lot of thinking beforehand. The idea is that it saves me a lot of time on the back end. Not that I don't revise, and not that the waiting to just write doesn't drive me batshit crazy, but for me, cleaning up something with a bad foundation takes way longer than laying down a lot of thought ahead of time.
Used to be I just had to know how shit ended. Now I have to know the middle bits, too. And side dishes. And how the guy sounds, you know, if he's hyper or pissed off a lot or restrained or what. I know a lot of stuff up front now, like what kind of jeans he wears. Some of that never makes it into the story, of course. Hell, a lot of it doesn't.
But that's how I roll.
So. Thoughts on thinking ahead?
3 comments:
Yep, I do a lot of head thinking first.
Who's cleaning up the milk, you ask? You need a cat.
Though I'm surprised, given the circumstances, that your dog didn't "step up to the plate" on this one.
Yeah. The dog woulda cleaned up. And then I would have had to clean the dog slobber.
I had a cat once, for 14 years. Cats do things like pee in basements, or in a box that stinks. Never again, unless they're outside cats.
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