Xandra Gregory

In the past seven days, we’ve had about eight inches of snow dumped on us.   No, we’re not nearly as bad as the eastern seaboard and their “Snowmageddon” (or is it “Snowpocalypse”?), but we’ve had our share.   And I’ve done my share in shoveling it, molding it, sliding around on it, and driving in it.  All snow is not the same snow.

All writing is not the same writing, either.  I’ve spent time recently with some very dense, heavy-packed, and slushy snow.  It’s hard to move around.  It doesn’t stick well to other types of snow, either.  Especially at certain temperatures.  Molding writing like that into a story without the same consistency is no picnic.  Trying to mold that dense snow to the icy powder at the next layer is an exercise in futility.  The powder is light and great for skimming over, wonderful for a fast read or action-packed scene, but it’s wispy.  It blows around and rearranges itself according to the wind, or even the shift of what’s underneath it.

To even get the hard-pack to come close to sticking to the powdery stuff, you have to cup your hands around the powder and breathe on it, just enough to melt a teensy bit of it for the dense stuff to grab onto.  And don’t think there’s a shortcut in the future where you can roll your snowball around for a quick and easy expansion–you’ll be fighting for every new millimeter added to its size.  You have to smooth the surface to get it to stick.  Pin those words down with the heat from your hands to ease the heavier stuff into bonding with it.

Then, underneath, is the ice.  The dangerous, subversive stuff.  The hard and unpleasant surprise at the center of a vindictive snowball, or the slick danger that looks like maybe just a patch of wet on the road.  Sometime’s it’s there because the ground was warm, then later cooled with the blanket of snow, freezing it back up after it’s melted.  Maybe it’s there because it’s been packed down and driven over.  Enough pressure has been placed on it that it’s hardened.  Frozen up into something with a smooth surface and a chill of its own to infuse its own properties into that of the other snow types that are making their way into the snowball of a story.  But it’s the ice that’s at the center of the story.  It’s hardest to change the properties of the ice.

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This entry was posted by Xandra on Friday, February 12th, 2010 at 8:21 am and is filed under An Author's Life, Deep Thoughts, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.