Oh, Yes, the Plot

 

 

I grew up on Sennebec Hill Farm, overlooking the lake of the same name in the town of Union, fourteen miles from the Maine coast. There wasn’t much money (eventually none) in raising laying hens, so we had gardens, wild blueberries, rhubarb, asparagus, and an apple orchard to provide a significant portion of our food while I was growing up.

What does that have to do with the concept of a plot for writers. Read on and I’ll explain. Mom realized early on that if she wanted her own spending money, she needed to get creative. She did so in large part by researching home economic practicalities, varied recipes, the history of rhubarb in America, then on to baking creative breads. Ever eat bread made with leftover macaroni and cheese, or day old baked beans? We did, and happily so.

One thing Mom learned and often utilized was selling variations of the same article to multiple magazines. She eventually expanded until she wrote two columns each week for the Camden Herald newspaper. One was called “Downeast Garden Ways”, the other “From The Orange Mailbox, Notes From A Few Country Acres.” A compilation of the latter became a book by the same title that won two awards.

 

In the process of growing up with two parents who had a passion for gardens (my father had a degree in horticulture), I learned a lot about successful gardening even if I hated pulling weeds. I watched their different styles. My father, primarily to his alcoholism, failed to tend to his garden in nurturing ways. He planted the same things in the same rows year after year and never seemed to understand that doing so depleted the soil.

Mom, on the other hand blended joy and wisdom into her garden. She used discarded phone books and workbooks from her day job (she was a middle school language arts teacher) to mulch around the edges, had a wire cage to toss weeds and things like corn husks and carrot tops into that became compost, but her big thing was the unbreakable rule—You can swim in the lake, but you MUST carry back a pail of leaf mulch for the garden. Three generations lived by that rule and as a result, that mulch, combined with ashes from her woodstove, lined the paths between raised beds.

 

Good writing/plotting takes a similar amount of thought and care. Mom NEVER planted the same crop in a plot two years in a row. When I read a book that has a similar plot to one I’ve read before (and let’s be real, the number of plots are truly limited at the basic level), what keeps me going is how the author used the elements to craft something that feels fresh to me.

I was in the pool yesterday morning thinking about what I’d be writing in the book I’m working on at the moment and realized I want to bring in the character from one of the short stories in Hardscrabble Kids because he was so well liked and will, as an adult, fit nicely into the plot.

Granted this is a bit long-winded, but it was what came to mind when I started planning my contribution for this month. How do you enrich your plots to keep them growing?