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Additional text added at 09:30 Saturday 19th April at the end of the published story installment denoted by orange 'Additional Text'

4  Laying out how the evolution of love unfolds

I am not a writer and cannot tell anyone how to write. 

If you are on an OU Creative Writing course, then that course is plainly where your first focus should be. I am making no recommendations, only demonstrating how I am learning.

The tags for this are: writing by numbers, the evolution of a character, the evolution of a story

These tags will be used only for posts that directly relate to this story and character evolution, so clicking on them in the list of tags will show only this evolution with the related posts. Because they will not display in chronological order the posts are numbered. This is number 4

Black font is pretty much final but subject to change. 

Red font text will be changed. 

Green font text is a replacement for the red font text.

I am going to also use blue font for comments and bold typeface and italics for something else.

So, green font is the replacement for the red font. Like this: Toby walked down his path. Toby ran across the lawn towards the path

So far, in 'Writing by numbers without numbers 1-3', which currently jump around in time, we have a compassionate and reasonably well paid solicitor (Toby) living alone who keeps his own garden, and is in love with Kate – who we have yet to meet and know absolutely nothing about.

The weeping woman, Mimie, with the crying baby may, or may not, find the twenty pounds that Toby has left for her to find on the footpath that leads to the main road during Winter. We haven't got that yet. In any case, later, in Spring, she has enough money to arrive at the courthouse in expensive clothes. She is also without the baby, though this is not implied or obvious.

Hazelnuts will grow outside the front door of Toby’s house and he catches a bus to somewhere in the latter stages of Winter. At this time, he is in love – supposedly with Kate, though this is not implied or obvious. It is also not obvious why he does not drive to wherever he caught the bus to.

In Spring, Toby’s focused attention is turned towards Mimie, the previously weeping woman, and they shall meet for coffee. Presumably, Mimie will explain how and what she knows Toby did.

These are the jigsaw pieces that are the easiest to make in the word-picture; pieces around the edges that form a sort of frame to the story. I have filled in some of the colourful pieces in the centre, yet they are still not attached to the frame of edges.

Most of what I have written, I think can stay. But now I must become aware of what is in the latter stages of the story in order that I do not waste time, while I freely imagine any future. If I do not establish shapes in the story I will struggle to make the whole story a cohesive whole, and so many rewrites will be essential, to such a degree that the story will need a complete new set of circumstances, in effect become a new story.

Toby is in love in Spring, but not in the preceding Winter; let’s find out what happened between Winter and Spring. Then, we shall look at the festive period of fullfilment in the final season of the year. We know that Toby will have hazelnuts. I need to know the end, or the scene at the end, to be sure what part Mimie, the distraction in Toby’s love life, plays in the final outcome of the story. Moving on to the Winter of a new year after Festive holidays traditionally spent with family and loved ones is a good setting for loss, loneliness and disappointment. This might complete a circuitous route of love, such as I wanted to explore. However, I need to freewheel for a bit to be comfortable with what to write, while keeping an eye on the end of the story.

Then I can fill in the gaps to make the story fun, sad, contrasting, and interesting. Finally, I shall put detail in and prepare for the final edits and then varnish the good bits. I expect this all to be done by the end of next week (Saturday 26^th April 2025).

The most important thing to remember is that it is not the story that has the most value to me. This takes the third place after first place winner; fun practice, then, very, very important to me, the second and most enduring value, having short cuts, of my own making, for emotions that, for me, are extremely hard to write about. The upshot of this, is that my pride cannot be wounded by criticism for my story-telling, as being only a story. For me, this story is a vehicle for learning.

I am just going to get the story written over the next couple of days, without much embellishment and then go back and liven it up.

Winter (continuing from 'Writing by numbers without numbers 2'). Winter is where the story begins and Toby is on the bus to somewhere. He will, today, sit next to the man who smells of wet dogs. In Spring (Writing by numbers without numbers 1), when he is in love, he does not share a seat with him.

grey sky; low cloud; swish of bus tyres through puddles and slush in the gutter; no chatter on bus; interior bus lights on; all the passengers heads nodding in the same direction in concert; dark clothes

No-one looked at him at the bus-stop. A couple of them moved from side to side, and everyone kept to their own space. Silence, There was silence, apart from little crunches from their shoes crushing small islands of late snow was all that Toby heard.

For Toby, it was predictable, almost fate, that he would sit next to Dave every day. It was as predictable as all the passengers' heads nodding in the same direction, all in concert, when they hit the pot-hole just before they entered the High Street, and again when their bodies simultaneously tilted forward when the bus braked sharply at the roadworks.

Toby got off on the High Street, outside the supermarket he usually bought his lunch from. The courthouse, where he worked as a defence solicitor, was just down a side street, conveniently opposite his office.

Kate, the prosecutor on his case eyed him with mild interest as he passed her entering the court. She knew that cases never got to court unless there was a very strong chance that the defendant was guilty, they both did. Day after day they took it in turns to go through the routine of explaining to the magistrates in their bored voices how bad the defendant is and then how pitiful the defendant is. Usually, they avoided each other. Today though, Kate had a seed of an idea. She was going to ask Toby if he would share his lunch-hour with her; not in his supermarket queue, instead, in the little Greek restaurant nearby.

I am going to skip to the following day when the weeping woman finds the money Toby left on the footpath and has a second lunch with Kate.

Mimie looked at the mildew on the bedroom ceiling and the condensation on the windows. No matter how hard she tried to keep the inside humidity down it touched the cold walls. The whole flat needed a complete overhaul and not just a wipe with diluted bleach.

The baby was crying. It needed changing and was probably hungry and scared too. Tears 'stung' her eyes. Skipping her own breakfast she, after making the baby as comfortable as she could gently laid it in its buggy. Carefully, she covered it, as best she could, with blankets warmed by the small electric heater in the living room. Weeping now, she left the block of maisonettes and headed out on her usual route around the block. The suited man blankly stared at her as they passed one another; he always did. Today though, she looked back at him. He was standing looking at her, then he hurriedly turned and continued.

The twenty pound note, Toby had left, was under one of the buggy's wheels, and stuck to it for a few turns as Mimie carried on walking, trying to soothe the baby with its motion and vibrations. A seed of something new has been planted, though it has not yet sprouted. This is in keeping with Winter in which there is no evidence of growth, only chances.

Additional Text

The second lunch with Kate was a little more relaxed and just as the sun always shone for a week in February, Toby felt the relationship between them had thawed a little and he had a hopeful belief that the genuine smiles that Kate briefly gave him would become longer and more frequent.

Fill in with restaurant noises and interruptions from staff. Late Winter is not a period when things stay where you last put them. The wind moves fences that need repairing and the cold and damp cause many people to with some desperation to quickly dump their tools in their sheds and forget to clean them properly. Phone calls interrupt gardening plans and so cultivating a garden requires a bit more dedication and energy than the participant often wants to provide.

Toby winced a few times at his clumsy verbal blunders, which Kate telegraphed with minutely raised eyebrows and an almost invisible smile which only touched her eyes.

‘At least, she is open.’ he thought. ‘Not at all like her courtroom persona.’

Eventually, after three consecutive lunches together, Toby was confident that a refusal for dinner with him would be skillfully and tactfully handed to him if Kate was not interested. Kate turned her head slightly down and sideways and looked at Toby out of the corner of her eyes.

        ‘I would love to,’ she said. Her lips remained straight and level with her straight dark eyebrows.

She didn’t purr, bat her eyelids, make a moue with her mouth, or touch her hair. I am allowing coquettish, though without a smile.

Toby was intrigued by her mixed message of carefully veiled sensual promise and simultaneous firmness. He found her profoundly alluring. She, on the other hand, was merely cautious and had been about to turn him down, so the smile never had time to reach her lips. She had decided that a simple ‘Okay’ was blasé and went with convention. At this stage, she was on par with the girls that give a false telephone number to chancers at night-clubs. ‘I would love to’ could easily become, ‘Something came up.’

They agreed to meet on Saturday night. It was Thursday.

The address for all my posts:  https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

3  The Evolution of Love  - Notes on Spring

It is, of course April, and my garden is flourishing with new growth, and because I am using Spring in parallel to the inception of attraction and love, it is important to ‘feel’ Spring. So, I have to make notes on how Spring affects me and pay attention to the tiny details that are happening now, details that I will not remember later if I never notice them now. Of course, understanding how to encapsulate love in a few short paragraphs is my paramount aim. Ultimately, it will go into my toolbox of tricks or more than likely stored in the spice rack of feelings and emotions, and gently placed on the shelf under the sign that says 'Fragile - Handle with care'. The frisson of new romantic attraction, I think, is difficult to show without following a well-trodden path of cliches. I have recently understood why writers might say that 'tears pricked his/her eyes'; their eyes are stinging! Maybe I am not sensitive enough to have got the meaning years ago; it just means, to me, that tears are forming; or maybe the effect of a cliche wears off. If I want to invent a character, it would definitely say, 'We need some new cliches.' For some reason, I want to include the feeling of being stung by a stinging nettle that has worn off so much that it is barely detectable as a feeling of excited attraction.

It is Easter, and as usual, people are hopeful of a bright, warm, sunny Summer with long evenings outside with friends. But that whimsical notion is played out in Summertime, and to avoid repetition (if I use it) I cannot mention long, warm Summers in the Spring section of my hypo-story (opposite to hyper). I should focus on the emergence of the people from their warm homes. It is a time of hope, of tentative dreams, of seeing plans begin to take shape, even a time of spending less time making plans, holidays are booked and hope and a tiny amount of excitement take root in many people. Whereas in Autumn there is a run-down of activities that runs into a Winter torpidity, Spring is an energetic season; joggers jog because it is just less punishing on the mind; when blue skies are above and their faces and especially the bridge of the nose, don't hurt from the cold air.

I recognise the seedlings of self-seeded flower plants, such as Calendula and Wallflower. I should spend a good deal of time making notes on what is taking place. So, there is an assurance that things are going well and I can expect some colour in my front garden without too much effort.

Blinking in the sunlight from too many days indoors; “Lovely weather!’; Nobody, but nobody says ‘Happy Easter’ …except one; Lush green; insects and bumble bees; vegetable seeds sprouting and the garden still not tilled properly, plenty of work to do but the task has its back broken by now; garden work seems to have more immediate effect and some time can be taken to look at it with some satisfaction; the hedge is trimmed straight enough; the neighbours are more obvious; annoying power tools are used, such as leaf blowers to ‘sweep up’ the hedge trimmings – use a broom, you lazy, clumsy thinking, fools; anger and annoyance. Rubbed up the wrong way. Cherry and apple blossom.

A Muntjac deer in my back garden ate most of my strawberry plants a couple of months ago, but there is one plant, in the front garden that has a lot of flowers emerging, among other strawberry plants which are slower,. ‘Pay attention to the watering this year’. A sad and significant loss in the back garden, but some hope left in the front garden. Cuttings from the Euonymus (Muntjac really enjoy eating this) did not take, before the deer was hungry in February (a frozen ground time), but that could be because I applied tomato fertiliser to the cuttings when I shouldn’t have.

1 The Evolution of a story that serves as an illustration in an unrelated subject.

One of the only ways I can write about something such as marketing or economics that makes any sense and is afterwards, to me, relatable, is to create characters and stories. This technique of conveying information is certainly not unusual in many books. In some dry books they are presented as case studies, and, for me, in interesting books they are given as examples.

One of the hardest emotions for me to write about, as an example to demonstrate a point I want to make in a piece, on, say, economics or logistics, is 'Love'. (Tricky subject). 

Many of us have heard of a cost - benefit analysis that should be done before a major decision is made. In economics, this is extended to include the cost of doing something in terms of alternative opportunities that will no longer be available once a course of action is taken. An example of this is less time spent with one's own children or partner at home if overtime at work is decided upon and enacted: the opportunity of interactive home-life with our children is fully negated if the children are put to bed by a partner before one gets home from work each work day. In order to describe this, we could write about the negative aspects in terms of pain, sorrow, and loss, and so on. We could 'show' the effect on the children too.

I want to learn how to write about the joy of love, passion for our loved ones, wider familial love and love for our communities. There are physiological changes in the body, but many of them are cliches; heart racing; butterflies in the stomach; a warm feeling; smiles even when adversity is apparent; and so on. Colours even seem brighter when we fall in love and our love is requited.

In this post, I am going to continually update my efforts to write about love; hopefully the evolution of love; how love plateaus; the bifurcation of love towards a single person to include attraction to a second person; the deterioration of love; and hopefully, the remnants of love lost.

Toby's garden will evolve in line with his love for a person

I am going to try to avoid cliches, but I will include them as placeholders - we all know what we are talking about with cliches.

The evolution from draft to, in my mind, close to a final piece of some kind, I shall leave in this post. The musing, the foolish, the unnecessary, and the mundane; all will stay.

Black font is pretty much final but subject to change. 

Red font will be changed. 

Green font is a replacement for the red font. 

I am going to also use blue font for comments and bold typeface and italics for something else.

So, green font is the replacement for the red font. Like this: Toby walked down his path. Toby ran across the lawn towards the path

I am not a writer and cannot tell anyone how to write. 

If you are on an OU Creative Writing course, then that course is plainly where your first focus should be. I am making no recommendations, only demonstrating how I am learning.

 An evolution

Toby and the garden fell in love

It was mid morning in mid-April, but it felt like late Summer to Toby. A warm yellow sun low in the sky shone on damp full leaved plants. It seemed that all the plants had already flowered and were now preparing to make seeds. Toby felt a simultaneous surge of bitter-sweet disappointment and contentment because, despite a late English Summer being his favourite time of the year, he somehow thought that he had missed the exciting journey of getting there. The flowers seemed to have already thrown a free festival with a riot of colour, and the bees and insects had been and gone. They hadn’t, of course, and Toby, returning from a memory of the past that had snuck in and masqueraded as the present, didn’t care, because Toby was in love.

His toast hadn’t burnt this morning. On the way to the bus, the miserable and lonely mother with the ever-crying baby in a stroller had smiled at him today. He was glad because normally he felt helpless when he saw her; helpless and unsure what to do. The bus arrived on time, and he didn’t have to sit next to the man who smelled of wet dogs, because the waiting passengers at the bus stop had unthinkingly complied with some innate and arcane reasoning to let happy people go ahead of them. If these people had been sword-wielding warriors arriving at an ancient battlefield already populated with vicious barbarians, they would have looked at any man grinning at the thrill of battle and laughing in the face of death, then looked at each other and said, ‘Yeah, we’ll let him go first.’ Today though, in modern day peaceful Suffolk, the waiting commuters had silently and morosely just shuffled aside out of the clump of bodies that was their queue, and Toby got on first, the corners of his mouth slightly upturned.

I am spontaneously moving towards his new love interest being the magistrate / judge who sentences him for some misdemeanor. We'll see. This paragraph with speech may not make the final cut. It is italic red so I know that it can be deleted because nothing following it rests on its existence yet. Italics are also used for different reasons.

In town, at the courthouse, Toby passed through the metal detector and collected his belongings. A five pound note lay on the floor near his foot.

       ‘Hurry up, move along, Sir’

       ‘There’s five pounds here,’ Toby said, pointing down.

       ‘Move along.’

Scowls came from the queue on the other side of the metal detector. Toby moved on. The person behind him had only a phone, so was quickly through,  and called, ‘Wait!’

Scowls came from the other side of the metal detector. Toby moved on. The person behind him had only a phone, so was quickly through. 

       ‘Wait!’

This (below) is a paragraph I wrote that was going to go before he got to the courthouse, but I am not happy with it. I think there is enough to describe how he is feeling and I want to move on with the story, so I have left it here for future reference and big changes, no doubt.

Normally, his twenty-eight year old body felt weighty, and sluggish. Today, however, it felt like his blood viscosity had changed from heavy crude oil, dark blue with frigidy, to high-octane fuel, bright red with oxygenated heat. It felt more slippery than before. The annoying ear-worm, he had had for the last three days, faded when it couldn’t keep pace with the new speedier pace of his heart. Everything that had shaded him yesterday could not shade him today.