Thank you so very much for addressing my question: it has been on my mind for a very long time, as I have encountered advocates of both extremes – those who say “plan every minute detail beforehand,” and those who say “plan nothing at all, just sit down and write.”

Both extremes have their pitfalls for me. I know, from experience, that if I plan too much, I get stuck in the planning phase, beat the idea to death, and never get around to the actual writing of it. On the other hand, to start from nothing – only the blank page before me – seems like cheating myself of half the fun. As you suggest, I love the living of it, and I love the way that life bleeds into my writing. There is nothing that I write about that is wholly “fictional” or completely “made up.” It may be unrecognizable once I am finished with it, but the seeds all come from life: from my own experiences, tiny snippets I read here and there, stories I hear told, small incidents or characters that somehow seem to stick out in my mind, grow there, and become larger than life itself.

Right now I think I am in this place that you describe: where I “feel a state of urgency in my soul,” but know that the development of the story cannot be rushed. For me, everything is about place. Almost all of my writing begins with that – a strong sense of place, and how place determines the shape of characters as well as their destinies. Most of my characters don’t have a lot of “free will.” In this sense, they tend to be rather tragic – products of the soil from which they sprout up, like crops in a field.

In my heart right now is this place called Paradise Trailer Park. It has been there for a long time, but only as a peripheral component of a larger fictional landscape. But recently, the lens of my inner -eye, for whatever reason, has zoomed in on this one patch of ground and its inhabitants. I don’t know a lot about it yet, but I am learning more and more every day. Like you say, as I go about living my daily life, I learn a little each day. For example, just yesterday I “learned” that a lady named Haddie Mayes, a “cafeteria lady” from the local school in the story lives in the trailer park, in a used camper she bought with the money her deceased husband stashed away, over the years, stuffed in coffee cans and hid in the deep freeze of the house they rented. She discovered the money when the electricity went out, due to a hurricane, and she was forced to throw out all the meat and vegetables in the freezer. This was just three days before she was to be evicted due to inability to pay her rent. I know that there are twenty-two trailers in the park, that it sits on the edge of a large swamp, where there is a boat ramp and a bait shop. I also know that there is a sawed-off cedar stump near the bait house, under the shade of large liveoak, and upon that stump, a plastic statue, about three feet tall, of the Virgin of Guadalupe, which was bought off the clearance rack at the Dollar Store, by Anna Perez, who lives in #18, and placed there by her grandson who is now buried in the cemetery up at Zion Hill. Out on the main road, at the entryway to the trailer park, is, one side of the driveway, a Pentecostal Church, and on the other, a little shack out of which Bunker Thornton sells boiled crawfish every Saturday and Sunday afternoon. I also know that a series of miracles is about to occur inside the circle driveway that outlines this cluster of mobile homes and old, rusty camper trailers – a series of miracles akin to those that, historically, led to the fame of such places as Lourdes, Fatima and Medjugorje.

So, nothing is exempt. Even this blog eventually flows into and feeds the development of this fictional place with its peculiar characters. In these days I find myself ravenously reading about historical apparitions, the places where they occurred, the manner of occurrence, the people who witnessed them, etc. It is a little of what you speak of in reference to your fascination with Cannes. And this obsession extends, naturally, to trailer parks too. I grew up in a trailer, so there is something about that life-style that is deeply rooted within me, and I used to zoom by them without a thought; now I find myself actually looking them up in the phone directory and spending my free time driving out to visit these strange places, tucked away in half-forgotten corners of the countryside in which I live. I’m not documenting – I’m not a journalist. I’m just absorbing impressions – feeling with some deep inner hand, feeling what the eyes do not always see, the stories behind closed doors, those that no one tells.

Thank you, Paulo, for freeing me of this idea that I have to follow one extreme method or the other: I can “plan” a little, which is really nothing more than living and breathing, thinking and being, on a normal level, and yet I don’t have to feel obligated to create some hard-lined, straight-edged blueprint before I even begin. In other words, I can just follow my intuition, and have faith that it will lead me to where I need to be – from beginning to end.

With much love and gratitude,
Savita