Edited by Martin Cadwell, Thursday, 17 Apr 2025, 07:56
2 Plotting how the evolution of love will unfold
[ 10 minute read ]
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 2
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
It seems to me that
I should start at the very beginning of when love is first discovered
in someone for someone else (or even something else – dog, cat
etc.).
In the 1944 film
‘Meet me in St. Louis’, as Esther Smith, a daughter of a wealthy
man, Judy Garland is about to leave the home, for a short time, and
gives the black housekeeper a squeeze, and says, ‘I am used to
you!’ There are two obvious reasons why her words were so: First, because
those words convey the type of love she has for her ‘friend’ –
of some years; or / and secondly, because it is set in 1905 and a white young
woman saying she loves a black woman would probably have been
scandalous, in 1905 (the setting of the film) and 1944 in the cinema. Nonetheless, her love is
conveyed, at least to me. It is easy to meld these two reasons for
the choice of words the screenwriters chose, to understand that the
film is about a young woman full of excitement and discovery and now
about to leave the house servants. It is important to show that
Esther (Judy) is kind and not complicated.
I think we get 'used
to' a puppy or a kitten as it turns into an adult animal and mourn our
loss when it dies thirteen or fourteen years later. Yet, if it died
on the same day we acquired it, many of us would be more upset at its
demise than our own upset at our loss.
Certainly, a sense
of attachment makes a difference to us. Our baby animal dying on the
first day we have it is different to hearing about our neighbour’s
new pet dying. There is an immediacy to having our own pet.
So, perhaps there is making
room in our emotions for someone else and an immediacy of interaction
necessary for there to be love. Yet, some say, ‘Absence makes the
heart grow fonder’, and others say, ‘Familiarity breeds
contempt’. I suspect from this, there is a different type of love
for our siblings than for our neighbours, or people who study or work
with us. In our early years we don’t get to be away from our family
members. It follows then, that platonic love is so pervasive that
romantic love cannot grow roots.
So, my character,
‘Toby’, must be attracted to someone or recognise something in
someone else that he finds exciting and would miss if it wasn’t
available to him, albeit intermittently. This recognition must be new to him.
There are times when there
comes a diminishment in faculties for good operation in the world by
our partners; through accident, age; or illness. Then, we are in the position
of being ‘used to’ that person being there, and we love them that
way - the 'spark' is absent. I am not going to explore 'sentiment for something that
is no longer there', as much as I would like to.
In order to ‘show’
love in my story about Toby, I shall describe his garden growing;
from its Winter bareness through early growth in Spring, Flowery
Summer, Abundance in Autumn, and back to Winter. However, this last
winter shall have rewards from the careful cultivation of his garden
and further afield throughout the year. For this to work, Toby needs
to gather nuts and fruit (and other stuff) for eating or
presentation, during a shared time with at least one other person.
My target length is
2500 words for the very short finished exercise in learning how to write about love, but the background and drafts will take more than 12000, I
suspect.
So, my story needs to
begin in Winter.
Toby and the garden fell in love
Winter - snow, cold, bleak, empty, windswept, lonely (as in alone / absence of people), rain, sleet, dead leaves, hunger (sense of deprivation), recognition of immediate needs not met (comfort / fun), a time of necessary tasks and not idleness.
Toby hated Winter. The greyness of the sky with no obvious depth to it, except its blanket of dull, disinterested, clouds, gave him no hope of being comfortable to idly make his way to the bus-stop today. On days like this, his, usually substantial, breakfast was not large enough to stand in for satiation of a need that he barely recognised, aloneness. He was not lonely, it was just there was a distinct lessening of people around during the winter months. People came out because it was necessary to do so, and not for fun.
There cannot be any milk delivered on the doorstep, no cat that affectionately rubs its scent on Toby's trousers, or anything else that might add hope to the day. Because these offer something pleasant to return to. It is not the weather that is important - it is the hollowness in Toby that I want to show. However, it is necessary to show that in his emptiness he is still compassionate, so there is a sad moment between his home and the bus stop.
The bare stems of hazelnut by his front door, despite being three metres tall, gave him no shelter from the frigid wind; a gusting wind that had travelled countless miles from the East and had no gift of value except a few dead leaves it blew across his path. His flower beds still showed signs of frost.
A young woman, sobbing and pushing a crying baby in a buggy passed him, coming the other way on the footpath to the main road. She miserably passed him every day. Toby thought she and the baby looked cold, and he opened his mouth to say something, but stopped. He would have taken the day off from work if he could help her somehow. These days offering help came across as pity and contempt. 'Perhaps she needs money for heating', he thought. Tomorrow, he would leave twenty pounds on the footpath for her to find, he decided. He kept walking, feeling helpless,hopeful, and ashamed. At this stage there should be no hope or satisfaction.
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, apart from little crunches from their shoes crushing small islands of late snow was all that Toby heard.
I am fairly happy with that - I have a hazelnut bush/shrub immediately outside his front door that will grow leaves, flower, mature, and bear fruit that he will pick and find useful for a winter festive occasion, with his love.
From a previous post - Writing by numbers without numbers 1 - which will now be much later in the story.
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.
Writing by numbers without numbers 2
2 Plotting how the evolution of love will unfold
[ 10 minute read ]
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 2
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
It seems to me that I should start at the very beginning of when love is first discovered in someone for someone else (or even something else – dog, cat etc.).
In the 1944 film ‘Meet me in St. Louis’, as Esther Smith, a daughter of a wealthy man, Judy Garland is about to leave the home, for a short time, and gives the black housekeeper a squeeze, and says, ‘I am used to you!’ There are two obvious reasons why her words were so: First, because those words convey the type of love she has for her ‘friend’ – of some years; or / and secondly, because it is set in 1905 and a white young woman saying she loves a black woman would probably have been scandalous, in 1905 (the setting of the film) and 1944 in the cinema. Nonetheless, her love is conveyed, at least to me. It is easy to meld these two reasons for the choice of words the screenwriters chose, to understand that the film is about a young woman full of excitement and discovery and now about to leave the house servants. It is important to show that Esther (Judy) is kind and not complicated.
I think we get 'used to' a puppy or a kitten as it turns into an adult animal and mourn our loss when it dies thirteen or fourteen years later. Yet, if it died on the same day we acquired it, many of us would be more upset at its demise than our own upset at our loss.
Certainly, a sense of attachment makes a difference to us. Our baby animal dying on the first day we have it is different to hearing about our neighbour’s new pet dying. There is an immediacy to having our own pet.
So, perhaps there is making room in our emotions for someone else and an immediacy of interaction necessary for there to be love. Yet, some say, ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder’, and others say, ‘Familiarity breeds contempt’. I suspect from this, there is a different type of love for our siblings than for our neighbours, or people who study or work with us. In our early years we don’t get to be away from our family members. It follows then, that platonic love is so pervasive that romantic love cannot grow roots.
So, my character, ‘Toby’, must be attracted to someone or recognise something in someone else that he finds exciting and would miss if it wasn’t available to him, albeit intermittently. This recognition must be new to him.
There are times when there comes a diminishment in faculties for good operation in the world by our partners; through accident, age; or illness. Then, we are in the position of being ‘used to’ that person being there, and we love them that way - the 'spark' is absent. I am not going to explore 'sentiment for something that is no longer there', as much as I would like to.
In order to ‘show’ love in my story about Toby, I shall describe his garden growing; from its Winter bareness through early growth in Spring, Flowery Summer, Abundance in Autumn, and back to Winter. However, this last winter shall have rewards from the careful cultivation of his garden and further afield throughout the year. For this to work, Toby needs to gather nuts and fruit (and other stuff) for eating or presentation, during a shared time with at least one other person.
My target length is 2500 words for the very short finished exercise in learning how to write about love, but the background and drafts will take more than 12000, I suspect.
So, my story needs to begin in Winter.
Toby and the garden fell in love
hopeful,and ashamed. At this stage there should be no hope or satisfaction.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!’