Next week I will be ensconced for one day in a secret location to write a novel. It is a rightly sorted place, not far from home, but it isn't home, and as I want to write from a part of me that doesn't have a microfibre cloth hanging out my jeans pocket, one ear listening for the cooker beeper, the other the washing machine beeper, and the other for my husband climbing the stairs, to find out exactly why I am not attending to any of these particularly unrightly activities. It is perfectly perfect. I hear your scoffs and throaty chorters and whispers of naïve, shouldering out the sounds of your own life's beepers, but the day is the bouncing baby of an impulsive response to a cute sounding email, a little rebellion to my own abilities, and a fairy cake dusting of sugary throwing caution to the spiciest, sweetest sounding winds of change. Because frankly, if I don't try, I will never know if I am capable of ransacking my life and experience and know what's and don't knows to produce a story that will keep a reader from page one to a hundred and fifty. I'm going for sausage dog size story, long enough to be noticeable, but short enough to be ditzy, and, I accept the possibility, trodden underfoot. I suspect we have all got an envelope slipped inside a book somewhere, on that celestial shelf of hopes and dreams, that sometimes, for no reason, flutters from its safe place, down through clouds and storms and light drizzle, and the low rumble of tin drums, to land at your feet like a golden ticket. We look around for men in black, monsters, or mean-spirited writers, who will dive in and hide it in the folds of their cloak, before we can say golden ticket. But seeing no one, we furtively pick it up, smell it, has to be done, and clasp it to our breast, except we don't. It is more like the ting of a message that distracts you, and even though you know you've read it, you should write a novel no less, it keeps showing up, unread, drab, press press, bang bang, go away. How many things do we do, just to get rid of them? Is that why I want to try, to say, I tried, I failed, back to the beepers, I don't know. You can't write a novel in a day, I hear you call from the rafters, I'm with you, I know, but in a way you can. In the seed is the potential of the whole fruit, and if I can plant that seed deep enough in the ground, and cover it up and water it just a little, so as not to wash it away, all in a day, is it not written in some potential landscape that we cannot see? I believe so. So, thinking about the day on my walk today, I randomly opened to the chapter, the outline, in my writing book that promises craft secrets. I lifted my nose in the air and was poised to skim to better chapters, such as the nature of art and artists, when I realised that the author was right. If I can't outline the story, I most definitely cannot write it. It will become a spaghetti junction of starts and stops and honking frustrations. No matter how many jump starts I give it, noxious fumes will ooze, and the words and plot will clang like chitty-chitty-bang-bang, and yes, that is almost onomatopoeic. Getting to the point. The seed will probably just be a juicy which, in case you know I have purple envy and want your own hold-up day, will comprise complication, development, 1-2-3, resolution. According to John Franklin in Writing for Story, each of the statements must be just three words, a noun, a strong concrete action verb, and a direct object, i.e. Joe eats apple. The development statements show what happens at the end of that section as you write towards it, not from it. The resolution must be just that, it must resolve the complication in some way, simple as banging a tin drum. So there's my seed in my palm, and if I can fill in the blanks, and maybe start on into the action, just a pipsqueak, I think holing up away from home will be a very golden ticket kind of day.