Last night I went to a reading by the poet Maureen Seaton, who read from her book of poems, Cave of the Yellow Volkswagen, her memoir, Sex Talks to Girls and her chapbook, America Loves Carney. The theme of these readings at the University of Miami is “Lyric Hybrid,” because all the writers have stepped outside of their usual genres to explore new forms of writing. You can listen to last night’s reading and the previous one by A. Manette Ansay on UM’s Creative Writing website.

My favorite part of the night was when talk turned to whether or not Seaton had thought of writing a novel. She replied that she’d tried, that she had a lot of scenes written, but no plot. She joked that she was waiting for the Plot Fairy to bring her one.

fairy-bookSo I’ve been thinking a lot about this Plot Fairy. Maybe she’s like the tooth fairy, and if I leave a little pouch under my pillow filled with pointless scenes pulled out of the mouth of my manuscript, she’ll come in the middle of the night and leave a crisp, new index card full of brilliant plot points. Or is she from the Tinkerbell lineage of fairies, sprinkling plot dust over my head while I sleep at night, making me dream of the one event that will have the perfect amount of cause-and-effect to piece everything together? Does she accept trades? Perhaps she’ll trade some excessive backstory for an event that forces my protagonist to make an important choice. And does she also do matchmaking work, to make sure that the subplots in the story are contributing to the overall plot?

Sounds like the Plot Fairy has a lot of work cut out for her, and I hear she’s been working overtime, with NaNoWriMo coming up, so I doubt she’ll be coming by my place for a while.

Which means I’ll just have to do all the work myself—making words appear, and then transforming them into other words, or making them disappear all together. It’s not as fancy as pixie dust or flying, but some days when I get it right—corny as this may sound— it can feel like magic.