COMPOST

by Janice Law

It’s been a hard winter here in the northeast, with a good four feet of snow on the ground for several weeks. Though we are getting more this morning, the stone walls have emerged, along with the various shrubs, the roses, and the compost pile. These welcome signs of eventual spring have gotten me thinking about compost of several types.

Take the gardener’s friend: the repository of autumn leaves and summer weeds, of vegetable scraps and corn cobs, and also for forgotten stalks of celery and heads of broccoli. Unlike some rabid horticulturalists, I can’t get into ecstasies over this biological gem, but I never have to feel too guilty when some neglected veggie can be composted.

While microbes do their work, the pile is a resource for hungry possums and raccoons, and a hunting ground for the Carolina wrens who, in turn, too often fall victim to the resident cat. Over the winter, the stalks and stems, the pulp and parings will be transformed into a light, chocolate colored loam, food for the many vegetables enjoyed by the rabbits, deer, and woodchucks who employ me as their gardener.

That’s the physical compost in my life, very good for reminding me of my age and, paradoxically, for encouraging the expansion of various floral designs. The other compost resides indoors, in a series of beat up and stretched-out-of-shape notebooks. In case of emergency, forget the bound volumes, the magazines with published stories, maybe even some unsold manuscripts – those are all the past. Grab the notebooks; the compost is the future.

Because, yes, like garden plants, novels and stories need feeding and mulch. Those clippings about a weird robbery, an intriguing disappearance, or the death of a mobster are to be laid down to mature gently like the autumn leaves. And what about a particularly pungent bit of overheard dialogue or glimpse of a distinctive face? Surely both deserve to be noted.

Then there are the ideas which all too rarely come full blown, but which are nonetheless worth adding to the pile. “Disposal of a murder knife in a restaurant’s dishwasher” was one. It took me a long time to fit that to a suitable crime with a suitable perpetrator.

Another notable idea grew out of many years of going to the local nude drawing group. Not as racy as it sounds, the meetings were a chance to draw, at modest cost, from professional figure models, an essential of art instruction. We met at the local state college in a handsome older building with an attached parking lot.

Being of a perverse turn of mind, I thought how interesting if someone came out late after classes one night, opened the car trunk, and found a body. Good idea! But the plot, always my weakest point, refused to develop from that moment of surprise. What I referred to as “the body in the trunk of the parked car” languished in first one notebook and then another. By the time I came up with a suitable victim, a suitable car owner, and a plot, cars had pretty much been converted to lock only trunks, a little difficulty I had to finesse.

Other provocative ideas have not come through for me – or not yet. One summer years ago when we were on vacation in France, I read about the massacre of a family. The killer was the father’s estranged brother. I made notes on how to manage this for years, constructed a plot in which the one survivor had become a major choreographer, had a fine “detective figure” in a male dancer who was sweet on the rehearsal pianist, and threw in the creation of a new ballet. No dice. This one did not work.

On the other hand, there are happy accidents. Watching a nature program one night, I saw a sequence with a Steller’s sea eagle, a monster bird from northeastern Asia with vast wings and searchlight eyes. For some reason this was just the very thing the character of the moment, a nice old guy who’d suffered a stroke but kept all his marbles, liked watching on TV. That eagle, along with lions from a show on the veldt, became the inspiration for his increasingly serious surveillance and detection efforts.

That’s an example of an easy transition from literary compost to the publication garden. Usually, there’s another step. When I want to write some short mystery stories, I trawl through my various notebooks and make a list of the possibilities. Some ideas show up time after time without coming to fruition. Others make a work list of three or four and turn into short stories or chapters in a new novel like well behaved mulch.

Why do some bits of compost come through and others fail? I haven’t a clue, but I do know that the process is important. Just as the tending of a compost pile signals that the gardener is serious, so the acquisition and upkeep of literary compost tells the gremlins of the subconscious to get to work. Hopefully, they come through soon, but better late than never.