CBMused

There is a saying that roughly states that you can never know where you are going, unless you first know where you came from. This thought sticks in my mind from time to time and gets me thinking. It may be the time of year and the inevitable reflective mood that it brings to so many of us. Regardless, it has caused me to go back and look at a few of my drafts and zArchives posts.

In the reading of some of these, I see no real path of continuity for my growth or change in writing methods. I have reached a point in my writing where I no longer consider the method I am writing in during the process. Upon reflection, I see that I write in many different styles at once or stick to one form of writing for weeks on end. What does this say about me as a blogger?

Sometimes I write with a purpose. I have a set goal in mind and use words that take me from Point A to Point B along the path that I choose. It is a very purposeful method of expression and is often nearly finished in the first draft. Other times I write with no real end in mind and just kind of get there as I wander through the story picking up words and scenes like a child on an Easter Egg hunt. This is a very exploratory method of writing and it often leads to a revision in the more purposeful A to B style. Often, my more creative pieces come from just this style of writing.

Still other times, I write in an overflowing gush of words that pours out onto the paper like a spilled glass of wine, forever imprinting the words in place no matter how hard I try to clean it up and make it blend. Sometimes, I am able to be purposeful or filled with wanderlust as I revise these drafts to something that resembles purposeful expression. These pieces seldom see the light of day in anything other than snippets as I will never be comfortable with them in an aesthetic sense. More often than not, they spur me to explore a small part of them and create a whole new draft that goes in an entirely different direction than the original piece.

How do you get from A to B?

♣

At some stage in the night I woke up from a dream, and in the dream I was in the process of building a house. Let me point out that I know nothing about building anything in my waking life, or it would seem, in my sleeping life either.

The house was all timber, as in there were no bricks. I was up to the bit where I had all the cladding on outside, had partially built half a roof, but them suddenly decided I needed to build a second story extension.

So I set about making the first beam and then I had that fast-forward thing where it was nearly finished. It even had furniture, a TV and ornaments in it - the only problem was that it had no stairs.

So I quickly decided a spiral staircase in the entry hall was required, and no sooner had I thought of it when I was standing on the top rung. I recall it was very rickety as I had only just installed it and it wasn’t secured properly to the floor of the second story.

At this point I looked around and as the staircase wobbled back and forth, so did the entire house. I realised that although it appeared to be almost complete and self supporting, I had actually not put a single nail in… anywhere. It was like a house of cards, all leaning against itself.

And there was I, standing on top of a shoddilly installed spiral staircase deliberately wobbling it…

♦

With the boxes unpacked and the furniture in place it was time to paint. In addition to my compulsive need to clean and scrub my new home with the same vigour as the old, I also had a need for colour. The crisp clean white walls that accompanied the “new” grew tiresome after only a few short nights.

At the hardware store I narrowed my choices for a feature colour to a soft sea-foam green and a striking crimson red. I have always been a person of two different minds, so why should this experience prove any different? When I asked another customer for an opinion (an older gentleman who looked as if he might always be building or fixing or painting something) between my two selected shades, I received more than a simple one word answer.

He encouraged me to choose the lighter sea-foam colour. In addition to talking about how it would compliment my hair he explained that it would go up neatly, without any incident. On the other hand, he gently informed me with the wisdom of someone who had painted metres upon metres of surface that the crimson would prove problematic. The first coat that I would apply would not look anything like the red square in my hand. The second and third coats would look even worse. It would not be until the fourth and fifth applications that my wall would start to resemble the vision in my head. With perseverance, and not a small amount of sweat, the sixth coat would show me what I had hoped for; in other words not a job for the faint-hearted.

When he had finished his lesson on painting he strongly recommended the softer safer colour, as if the other had vampiric qualities. I thanked him for his advice, but I couldn’t resist asking: So if you went to visit a friend in a new home, which of these colours would make a greater impression? His answer was not surprising.

Now I have some brushes to clean and a few more coats of paint to apply. And incidentally, the flecks of crimson look pretty good in my hair.

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