I Prayed for Rain, But…

I hate moving, but I finally got around to looking for a new apartment and changing my address.  The apartment’s great.  It has everything one could want:  good square footage, tons of storage, private patio, fireplace, laundry room, covered parking, two pools, and a workout room. I hired the fire department’s moving service to load and transport my belongings and proceeded to set up my new home. Unfortunately, my upstairs neighbor’s washing machine malfunctioned and my apartment flooded. So here I sit, watching the ceiling over my breakfast bar buckle and sag while I make bets with myself on how long it will take for the sheet rock to fall to the floor. (I’ve settled on 10 AM Tuesday morning.)

No, this is not a joke. Less than one week in my new place and I feel like the movers just unloaded everything. Unexpected, yes, but then again, that’s life. As we are well aware, stuff happens. Wise ones prepare for it and use it to their advantage. As writers, we must view the unplanned as a tool to make our work stronger and more real.

Let’s address the practical first. Back-up your work. My office was in the path of the flood. The complex’s maintenance team handed my computers to my sister and me. I was nearly in tears as we dried them off and checked them out. You see, three hundred pages of my four hundred page novel were on one of the units. “Did you back this up?”  Of course I had backed it up, but my external hard drive was in the office and I didn’t know how much of the room was under water.  My new plan is back everything up on the external hard drive and on a disk or flash drive.

As for the creative side, use an unexpected turn in your work as an opportunity to explore subplots in your storyline. You may first think “Where did that come from?” but do not delete it. You may not have planned the romance or the death, but what if the event is the catalyst that moves your story to a higher level? Why not explore the possibilities? Should you decide not to use the event in the current work, save it in your “unplanned and unexplainable file” for a future project. Never, never, never toss out your outtakes. They could be a goldmine later.

Cait Collins