PREPARATION.

Preparation is boring.  Plain and simple...boring.

Recently I've been painting walls, and frankly all I wanted to do was whip some colour on those said walls. End of story. Job done. But what quality of job?

So of course, we do the prep work...cleaning walls, then other-half skim coated the walls and sanded them down...then came the fun of sweeping them clean of dust...then the undercoat...then finally...and yes finally because all of this prep work took weeks of weekends...finally the painting.

But of course there was the first coat, then wait to dry, then the second. Making sure to be very careful, no paint anywhere it shouldn't be, to avoid the skirting boards, window frames and ceilings.

Now the walls are painted, and a good job done by all. But it wasn't a quick job.

It's a lot like writing. Sometimes you just want to put it down. Want that page filled, that screen to be a row of black letters marching along. But without any preparation, without thinking it through and taking it step by step the end result will always be sloppy.

Even painting is not as simple as slopping some paint on. First there is the choice. Choosing a colour these days is intense. There are so many variations out there. White is not merely white, there are warm whites, cool whites, creamy whites, grey whites, whites with a touch of green, yellow, pink...you get the idea. Sometimes the hardest choice is the colour. The starting point.

Same with writing. Where do I begin? Is it at the death bed? Is it at the point of the accident? Or perhaps is it later on at the funeral? Deciding where to actually begin is a hard decision but one that makes the whole rest of the story.

So once the hard choice is made, then it's all the boring preparation. Who is telling the story? How many characters in this story? Has this poem began at the right point, and does it have too much in it? Could it be two poems instead of one?

Once that is done, let's call it the sanding and undercoating, then the top coat. But once again, it is the fiddly bits that require the skill and attention.

Avoid taking the paint to places it is not needed. Not spill it, not overload the brush, but then again don't be too sparing.

With writing you have to give enough so that it makes sense, but not too much that we are soaking in thick words that we can't wipe off.

But once all that work is done, the preparation and the careful applying of word after word...then the final product is something that makes you sit back and go 'yeah that's good.'

Before I go, three of my audio poems can be found here....Lipservice journal...
http://lipservicejournal.tumblr.com/

Enjoy
Vicki