Picking up on Lars’ post on idioms a few days ago, Dr. Goodword is all over idioms and slang this week like white on rice.

One of the greatest tricks of the comedian is to find situations where an idiom may, in fact, be analyzed, leaving the listener in a quandary—does he or she mean the idiom or the literal meaning? In an episode of the TV series Mash, hearing that a soldier has been dishonrably discharged, Hawk-eye asked, “Why? Was he rotten to the corps?” Now, when you hear this, it sounds identical to the idiom “rotten to the core”, which means simply to be extermely bad. Which did Hawk-eye mean, corps or core?

And no, I don’t know that the good doctor was inspired by Lars’ post. Possible–probable–but I can’t say.

About 1,100 words today. That’s not bad. I shut down the computer thinking there hadn’t been any fireworks again, but I was premature.

Shortly after saving and exiting, I suddenly realized why one of my characters had done something he’d done. I wasn’t entirely sure at the time, and thought maybe it was inappropriate to the scene. But afterward I figured out his motivation, and said, “Yes! Of course! That’s exactly what he’d do!”

These are the “that’s my boy!” moments for a writer, when characters you aren’t sure have any life to them, suddenly show signs of getting a job and leaving home. It’s a sort of pale imitation of parenthood, in a remote, attenuated form.

I’ve never written a book in quite this way before. My standard novel-writing system, as I’ve said many times, is to scribble notes on slips of paper as characters and scenes and themes occur to me, and then arrange them in an MS Word document, in more or less the order I expect them to occur. When I’ve got enough stuff there to qualify as an outline, I then begin writing my story at the beginning of the document, and removing each plot point from the end as I use it. Eventually I have a completed book with a little rubble of discarded mental detritus at the end, which I then erase (although it was pointed out to me recently that I ought to keep my character lists, at least, in a separate document, for use in sequels, if any. Good idea).

But this book is being written blind. I’ve got characters, setting, and a basic idea for the book which I can best describe as a sort of rhythm. There’s an “impossible” event which happens, and then happens again, and then happens again, at intervals in the story. Everything else reacts to that.

So this time, the writing itself is an adventure. I keep discovering my own story. I’ve always considered writing without an outline kind of a lazy technique, but it might be the best way for me. I suspect that, sometimes in the past, I’ve twisted my characters’ arms to do things they didn’t really want to do, in the service of a predetermined plot.