And Then There Was The Poodle . . .

So the morning after Barely Surviving Food Poisoning I was noodling on my manuscript when suddenly, without any warning or provocation, a poodle insinuated itself into my scene.

I had no idea what it was doing there, and it wouldn't tell me (although it looked up at me very cutely). I asked it politely to leave but it refused.

I really wanted to get rid of it (yes, even though it looked at me so sweetly) because to keep it meant I had a bunch more writing to do on that particular scene. If that poodle hadn't shown up, I might have been able to convince myself I was finished. I could have tweaked a few more words and then moved on. But the darn dog looked at me adorably (and enigmatically) and I couldn't just delete it.

I bit the bullet and began to write. Obviously it needed an owner, and a entrance into the scene so I wrote those and then wondered what to do because none of that told me why it was there. So there I was: unable to finish the scene until I figured out what to do about the poodle. It wasn't until the next morning when I was on the bus that the reason for the poodle popped into my mind.

But here's the thing. I've never had a gift poodle before, but at different times various bits of story have dropped out of the sky (a.k.a. my subconscious) and into my manuscripts. Do they always belong there? No. Sometimes they are purely distractions, or stray bits that are trying to adhere to the prose without having any purpose at all. How did I know that this poodle wasn't a bit of jetsam especially since I'm a plotter and not a pantser?

There's no simple answer. Part of it is learning to trust my instincts. I could tell it wasn't just any poodle but a poodle with a purpose, and the purpose was to illustrate something that I hadn't so far. But that couldn't be all of it. For the poodle to really work, it also had to add something to the plot. Once I realized that, the answer was obvious and it's actually still coming to me. It could easily be a thread that runs through the whole manuscript.

Let's hear it for the occasional gift poodle!