So It's Wednesday Again

I've been tiling my floor in my storage/craft room. One 12x12 inch space at a time. I chose earth tones because I want the room light and bright. Okay, I hear you...what does this have to do with writing? A lot.

 

There are several ways to lay tile on a floor as far as design goes. You can lay them on a perfect square. Linear with pain stalking detail and dividers for the grout. Linear writing is when you go from start to finish in a linear time line. For some writers this works perfectly.

But then there are other options in laying tile and writing too. Offsetting your tile is like when you bounce here and there within a chapter filling in bits and pieces of scenes. Yes, you are still basically writing in a linear fashion with a slight twist. You choose where you want to begin and end the scenes and piece them together slightly skewed from beginning to ending.

The diagonal tile placement or writing is when you take a high point and jump to another high point filling in the pieces leading up to your high point and the lull between another high point in your story. It's zigzag. There is a rhythm although twisted. There are probably more ways to write a story than there are tiling layouts so I will leave off with the last example.

Like the diagonal placement of the tiles this variation is the scattered layout. You layout your major scenes and then juggle the rest of the in between later. This is also known as writing in chunks. It's like a quilt. You almost know how the pieces are going together, but not quite until you finish what you are writing. For me in particular this last style of writing would drive me nuts although it has worked very successfully for several NYT bestselling authors.

I'm a mathematical type person who sees angles which allows me to quilt one block at a time, but when it comes to writing I choose one of the first two options. I know my beginning, middle, and end. I have the story I'm writing laid out in my mind and on paper before I write. Although creative, I'm linear. I have to see the continuity of the story before continuing.

After saying all this what design did I use for my floor. I saw this picture on the internet and although it was a back splash...I decided on doing my floor like it. Being a quilter and linear writer helped me with the layout for my 10'x12' room. Lots and lots of end rolls of newsprint with colored pencils and I had my floor laid out. Grouting it all will be a royal pain, but it in the end...it will be one of a kind and fabulous!

What did you expect? Standard floors from a creative person. Oh, I forgot to mention...I'm not using mosaic tiles, those tiny 1x1 things, mine are 6" and cutting them down into the curves. Because sometime when writing and laying tile nothing is truly linear.

So what tile, er um, writing style do you have?

Keep writing and loving the Lord.