It was once believed that any human who stepped inside of a Fairy Ring, would be under the spell of those mythical creatures, overcome with the desire to dance until they went mad or died of exhaustion.
So what bizarre segue, you may wonder, will I find to connect fairy rings with writing?
It’s all the same. An interconnected world.
The thing that makes a “fairy ring” is the mycelium – tiny root hairs – of a mushroom. They spread out across a large network below the earth, then in the spring, when it rains, those hairs sprout up into mushrooms at the end of the tendrils, forming a rough circle of mushrooms.
It’s rather like plotting a novel.
We begin with a thought, an image, a spore of an idea. That idea spreads like a fungus. Yes, story plotting is a fungal infection. You begin to eat, sleep, breathe and expand on that idea… rather like mycelium. Before long, you’ve got a network of characters.
You’ll find a plethora of blog posts, youtube videos, etc., explaining how you should plot a story. I’m a bit more… organic… but yes, I do it in basically the same way. I like the tangential connection, that almost always, eventually, sprouts into a mushroom at the end of the tendril, but remains interconnected with all of the other little mushrooms in the neighborhood.
As an aside, did you know that the largest living organism on earth is a mushroom in Oregon? It covers more than 2K acres, connected via the mycelium below the soil.
It’s not nearly as romantic as fairy lore. I will continue to dance… slowly going mad… and write the next story…
