Plastering the holes

First, a quick follow-up from last week: my wife removed the staples from my scalp, I have no headache, and the radiologist read my CT scan as normal. So all is good, though I have a healthy new respect for gravity.

This past week I’ve been plastering in my living room. We have an older house (older from an American perspective, anyway, where the country itself has only been around for 240-some years). There was water damage around the chimney; the water had leaked through the brick and damaged the plaster. Once we were sure the source of water had been fixed, I removed the affected plaster, leaving large, ugly holes in my living room wall. I replastered the holes, sanded, and now I’m repainting. Very domestic!

Plastering leaves one a lot of time to think. It occurred to me that in some ways plastering is like writing. As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, I’m the kind of writer who creates characters, puts them in a situation, and then documents what these characters — who are real in my mind — do and say. I do not outline before I write. Imagine doing this for an 80,000-word novel such as Beautiful. There are bound to be plot holes…quite a few, as it turned out for my debut novel. Some are obvious; some are subtle. Each one must be found (thank goodness for beta readers) and plastered over so that it’s no longer a hole. When I’m done, the plot…or the wall…is seamless and complete, and looks as though it were always that way.

The other similarity between writing and plastering, of course, is that in both cases the process is incredibly messy. It takes faith, which is an action verb, to continue forward through the mess, believing that the result will look beautiful.