Nancy Springer's Blog: Last Seen Wandering Vaguely - Posts Tagged "language-of-flowers"

So this morning I was arranging flowers, and enjoying the process as I hope most people do, and promising myself I’d arrange flowers more frequently from now on, when I had one of those wonky little insights: the Zen of flower arranging is a lot like that of writing a novel. Sure, writing a novel takes a whole lot longer, but the giss is the same.

Now I’m mixing metaphors and venturing into birdwatching. Experienced birders can tell what species a bird is even if they only glimpse it from a distance and cannot possibly see any detail of its markings. They just know it the way we know our friends in a crowd, by some holistic mix of size, shape and gesture. They identify the bird by its giss.

I am not one of those expert birdwatchers. Most of the time I can identify what I see only as an LBJ (Little Brown Job). Nor am I an expert flower arranger. But once I have the material, the blossoms and greens, in hand, I get a notion of what I want. I sense a giss, and that’s pretty much the way I approach my writing too.

What makes flower arranging or writing different from birdwatching is that the giss (I just love the word, but no, I can’t it in any dictionary, and I hope I’m correct in figuring it has a hard g)—the giss doesn’t have to exist in nature outside your mind, and doesn’t have to be one that you were taught. Arranging flowers, I tend to make bouquets dangle over the vase at the bottom and rise to an accent at the top, but if the blossoms take on personalities (become characters?) and if they insist on a top-heavy spread or a lollipop vibe, I’ll go with it. If I want to stuff all available flora into a vase, so be it. Or if I want to take a single blossom and arrange it with a fern and a piece of driftwood, I’ll do that.

Similarly, fiction writing can be rich and full, with deep texture, multiple characters, subplots – or it can be sparse, economical, and stylized, like haiku or a Japanese flower arrangement. And novels don’t always have to form that same old triangle of action rising to a climax then resolving to a conclusion. They can start as a wide spiral and home in on an ending. They can circle There And Back Again (the Hero Journey of Joseph Campbell fame). They can fill in gradually to form a mosaic or patchwork quilt or, okay, a fluffy bouquet of varicolored blossoms not entirely visible to the reader until the end.

I generally doodle my books before I write them, or at least before I revise them. One YA book of mine, THE BOY ON A BLACK HORSE, shaped up to be a long horizontal triangle diminishing to its point (Gray’s story) overlapping another triangle flaring out (Chav’s story). It would be a lot easier if I could draw a sketch of what I mean right here, but think of one plot opening from a bud to a blossom while the other plot-blossom closes for the night.

My fantasy novels MADBOND, MINDBOND and GODBOND I conceptualized as three separate heroic characters trying and failing and finally succeeding in saving their edenic world by achieving balance and symmetry – radial symmetry. I think of them as three big, bright morning glory blossoms overlapping, triply overlapping at the center, and kind of forming an equilateral triangle, like the three rings joined in the old Ballantine beer logo.

And I didn’t realize it at the time, but in my early fantasies -- THE WHITE HART, THE SILVER SUN, THE SABLE MOON, all with two heroes, one magical, moody and shadowed, the other brave and bright – in all of them, the plot to save a kingdom was driven by struggle for a symmetry to come together, for acceptance of what was opposite yet the same. For the embrace of yang and yin. Surely somewhere there has to be an orchid with a blossom shaped that way.

The six volumes of my Enola Holmes mystery series are full of floral references referring to the Victorian Language of Flowers – but heck, let’s not stop there. All of the books have three plots intertwining like vines -- in fact, at times I called Enola Ivy, and at times I thought of Sherlock as poison ivy! One of the plots was always for Enola to elude and outwit Sherlock. The other two were Enola trying to make contact with her mother, and Enola in search of a missing person. (Not her mother. Another missing person.) These books were devilishly difficult to write, and for that reason if no other I do not recommend too much ivy in your next flower arrangement. It has a mind of its own. Not that you don’t want that in a character, but enough is enough.

Enough is enough? Okay, I admit I am putting an awful lot of strain on a poor, innocent floral metaphor that may or may not work for you. But I think it’s tremendously important for writers to conceptualize what they are doing as closely related to any other form of art – carving, painting, sculpting, poetry, music, poetry, dance on and on and on – and to appreciate how much freedom we can enjoy by regarding our stories differently. Character arc, for instance, doesn’t always have to arch, all meek and graceful like lily-of-the-valley; it can aspire like larkspur, or climb like clematis, or run wild like – like me, dammit; I’m doing it again.

Apologies. In the language of flowers, peonies are for apologies.

And smiles. Did you know that peonies can’t open by themselves? They need ants to chew their petals apart.

Which reminds me, again, of the writing process....