Nancy Springer's Blog: Last Seen Wandering Vaguely - Posts Tagged "4-d-characters"

This is about writing, although it starts off being about me. I am definitely the sort of person who will be found “wandering vaguely” with cat hair all over my clothing. It used to be dog hair, when I was a kid and my mom raised Shelties, but now it is cat hair, as I take in strays. But I digress. What I mean to say is, most people don’t appreciate having cat hair slathered all over their sweaters, and they try to avoid it or remove it.

I have no way of knowing for sure, but I think most people probably wouldn’t appreciate cat hair of the mind, either, or brain lint (same thing, minus pet metaphor). What I’m talking about is those loosey-goosey kind of featherweight nuances that the world powders upon us every day. I have a feeling that the average practical-minded, efficient person automatically dusts this stuff away, barely conscious of the ongoing mind cleanup they necessarily perform in order to keep functioning.

But my circumstances are different, so different that personally, I like – no, I love -- the brain dust, the cat hair of my mind. It’s what I need for writing, but also I just plain wallow in it, like a hoarder nesting in garage sale treasures. My consciousness seems to generate a kind of electrostatic charge that attracts tiny random floating manifestations and takes them in. Even more remarkable and alarming, now that I think about it, is the way they come wafting forth for me just when I might need them for something I’m writing.

Well, usually.

Anyway. Examples? I’d love to show off my mental equivalent of house dust thick enough to write in. But first I’d like to mention that my brain’s accumulation of life lint, although random, nevertheless is sure be qualitatively different than that of other authors who have cat hair of the mind, because we’re all as individual as our pets’ noseprints. The conductivity of my mind attracts ethereal particulates differently than anyone else’s.

Now, right now, I am asking my mental lint hoarder for examples and it is offering up Things With Blue Tails: juvenile five-lined skinks, blue-tailed skippers(tiny butterflies), some dragonflies, some peacocks, maybe Smurf primates? That last one is pretty lame, but a writer is entitled not to edit brain fuzz. Anything goes. Things That Bite, in my experience: yellow flies, hamsters, skeeters, boa constrictor, white mice, Lone Star tick, mastiff, scorpions, fire ants, impertinent fish, teething babies. But not all the cat hair of the mind clumps into lists. Floating intimations abound. The giant silk moth is the butterfly of the night. A dandelion is first a yellow sun, then a full white moon, then thousands of stars. A skeletal armadillo looks like a seashell washed up on an inland beach. Women who wear hats with bright, realistic flowers on them are in danger of attracting hummingbirds. The paisley motif resembles nothing identifiable yet paisley-patterned fabric has been around for millennia; it must mean something: fishes, gourds, gravid lizards?

Cat hair of the mind. I guarantee you that the kind my brain snags is different than that of, say, my brother the mechanical engineer with the model train set monopolizing his basement. Mine’s way too organic for him. And his is unknowable to me unless he starts writing.

What “cat hair” has to do with fiction writing is simply everything. A sprinkling of brain dust enriches storytelling in so many ways I find it hard to specify. It adds a whole nother dimension, beyond three, to characters. It takes visual images to the next level, like holograms. It functions kind of like a writer’s Mandelbrot Set, allowing something tiny and random to generate pattern. I admit that in referring to Fractal Theory or Chaos Theory or whatever they call it, I have barely a particulate of a clue what I’m talking about, but I recognize beauty when I see it. And I sense a certain Mandelbrot-style self-similarity in my own creative process, which is maybe just a fancy way to say “theme.”

Fractals aside, maybe not every writer needs mental cat hair, but I do think a somewhat messy mind helps, and I recommend trying for one. My mind has been accumulating the dust of the world since I was a child, but I see no reason why a person shouldn’t start anytime. It’s just a matter of not throwing away the everyday detritus of living. Go ahead and hoard. Upstairs, in your head, it can’t do any harm.