Writing from Scratch

It's not necessary to have ingredients on hand to start writing a novel.  Unlike scratch cooking, you concoct most everything that goes into it and make up the recipe as you go along. 

Planning my current story began with a brief image from a dream that I recorded in a notebook some time ago.  The dream had a poor child huddled in bushes by the door of a privileged home, an open carriage driving up to the door, a man who pulled his children roughly to the ground, a girl who fell, and the small girl who rushed from hiding to help her.  The story, I thought, might be about the poor girl and the privileged children who'd just lost their mother.

I pursued that idea for some days, looking at pictures of carriages, imagining scenes for the child, creating her history, considering where and when the story might take place.  Eventually she became a different character; I didn't use the bush scene, reduced the children and their father to minor characters, and forgot about the carriage. 

To get to that point I did a lot of thinking in many directions, recording even the least promising ideas in my messy spiral notebook or the better organized OneNote Notebook, sometimes waking and writing in the dark to preserve a thought without coming fully awake.

It’s harder in the beginning.  Writing from scratch is not like cooking, but like working a puzzle of your own design, having only one piece and no clue to the whole picture. 

I thought a lot about the main character and possible bumps in her road, and tested ideas in brief scenes.  In a OneNote section labeled "Problems," I created a page of "Character Problems" and one of "Author Problems."  Author Problems included things like "Why would she be in that place at that time?"  Also inconsistencies to be fixed.

To make the setting and society authentic for 1900, I developed 49 pages in a OneNote research section and to answer questions that popped up, like "Would there have been metal barrels then?"  In the research section I also pasted pictures, thanks to Internet, of such things as decorative iron gates and primitive washing machines, and copied words to a Fanny Crosby hymn and quotes from Longfellow's "Evangeline."  Now that I'm 20 chapters into the story, I know I won't draw on most of what’s in those 49 pages, like the description of glove-making.  But I have a feel for the time, and the search has been fun.

When I get stuck I read back over all my notes and hope a new, logical direction will emerge when I wake in the morning.

Cleaning a Slop Jar in 1883

Wide Awake by Charles Trowbridge Pratt

Because my new novel-in-progress is set in 1900, I’ve been researching details of daily life in the late 19^th century.  I bought two books and read another via Inter-library loan, but the greatest help has been the storage of memories, documents, and special interests on Internet sites. 

One day, thinking a character might have to clean a slop jar (chamber pot), I googled “clean a slop jar” and found a wonderful publication scanned by Google Books.  The name of the publication is Wide Awake by Charles Trowbridge Pratt and the (or "of the") Chautauqua Young Folks’ Reading Union, published in 1883.  The work appears to be a course of study, with stories, poems, and illustrations by authors and artists, plus other sections like science, music, cooking, housekeeping, and business.  Today I downloaded this treasure in PDF format and may post a review of it later, though the PDF file says it’s more than 1,000 pages long.  Here's an excerpt.  No more complaining about cleaning the bathroom!  

"... [plenty of] hot suds for washing the toilet ware and clean dry cloths for wiping should go round with the slop pail every day. Bring the chamber pail now with hot water and a pitcherful of the strong hot soda water I told you of, and wash and scald every article, for you will find they need it. Often the sediment on pitchers and bowls will need sapolio [brand of soap] to remove it, for it almost becomes part of the glaze in time. That neglected slop jar you will take out, and scrub with a broom and suds, not touching it with your hands; then let it stand with scalding soda water in it an hour or two, rinse, drain, and leave it all day in full sunshine.

…But you must know that dirty water leaves a slimy coating on whatever it stands in, wood, china, or tin, which is not rinsed off, and if left in this careless way, your slop jar takes a lining of putrid matter which gives the bad odor to ill-kept chamber ware."

Writing is a good excuse to be distracted by all kinds of interesting stuff.