{"id":5474,"date":"2018-11-15T23:51:29","date_gmt":"2018-11-15T23:51:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dianeduane.com\/outofambit\/?p=5474"},"modified":"2023-09-03T08:05:30","modified_gmt":"2023-09-03T08:05:30","slug":"the-backs-of-the-melons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dianeduane.com\/outofambit\/2018\/11\/15\/the-backs-of-the-melons\/","title":{"rendered":"The Backs of the Melons"},"content":{"rendered":"

(This post via Tumblr, where it originally appeared.)(And still does, here,<\/a> but some people don’t care for the new data permissions on Tumblr, and who could blame them?)<\/p>\n

In a reply to @sophies-sideshow at Tumblr:<\/p>\n

\n
Has anyone ever told you that the little details about your young wizards ‘verse are tantalizing and lovely? Because they are. I for one love seeing the little glimpses into the world you’ve created.<\/h5>\n<\/blockquote>\n

You\u2019re very kind to say that! Thank you.<\/p>\n

I guess, too, that worldbuilding for me isn\u2019t all broad strokes and big design. It\u2019s also about the small things, the details that characters notice and the way they use\u2014or maybe a better word is \u201cexploit\u201d\u2014what you give them. For example, I once got a very nice note from somebody at NASA about the fact that in SPOCK\u2019S WORLD, our eponymous Vulcan is using transporter technology in a very off-label manner to keep his Captain\u2019s ground coffee fresh over long periods. \ud83d\ude42 That\u2019s the kind of thing that makes a world real for me. A world should be complex enough to be exploited in ways the author didn\u2019t expect. (Or would have expected if they\u2019d taken more time to think about it.)<\/p>\n

There are a lot of details in the YW universe that nobody but me will ever see: which is as it should be. It\u2019s only the insecure creator who gets obsessive about Showing All Their Work.<\/p>\n

\u2026And we now cue the Mel(l)on Story. It may be apocryphal, who knows? But I don\u2019t care. It goes like this:<\/p>\n

Cathedrals are never finished. Bits are always falling off and having to be put back on again; and the interiors can take years and years to complete, even if they were \u201cfinished\u201d centuries ago.* Now, as it happens, the National Cathedral in Washington for a long time still matched this description. It was years <\/i>being worked on. The inside was a mess of scaffolding for a good while, and sculptors in particular were busy there for ages.<\/p>\n

There was (and still is, as far as I know) a big banking family in the US by the name of Mellon. (They had banks in the Philly area when I was living there.) They were a big contributor to the work on the Cathedral, and as a result the carvings in the place are full of punning references to them: melons and melon vines and gourds and pumpkins and whatnot all over the place.<\/p>\n

So there\u2019s a stonemason\u2014this one, I\u2019m betting\u2014<\/a>way up high in the scaffolding working on the back of some kind of pumpkin or whatever. And he\u2019s taking forever <\/i>over it. And somebody passing through watches him at this for a while, and then yells up at him, \u201cWhy are you wasting so much time on that? You\u2019re forty feet up, you\u2019re halfway behind a pillar, there\u2019s no light, nobody\u2019s ever going to see that!\u201d<\/p>\n

And the stonemason pauses and peers down at whoever\u2019s yelling at him, and yells back, \u201cGod<\/i> will see!\u201d And then goes back to what he\u2019s doing.<\/p>\n

Leaving aside the religious resonances (obviously assisted by being in a cathedral at the time), I think that guy had exactly the right idea. The way to do the Work\u2014regardless of one\u2019s religious inclinations or lack of them\u2014is to proceed as if God would see. If you\u2019re going to be a subcreator (in the Tolkienian sense), then be a good, thoughtful, thorough <\/i>one, and don\u2019t leave something half-finished or half-thought-through because you don\u2019t think anyone will ever see it. You <\/i>will see it\u2026 or its lack. And its presence, or absence, will invariably affect other things in the interior structure you\u2019re building, whether you notice that happening or not.<\/p>\n

You don\u2019t have to show the work. But you have to do it as if people might come and look at it at any minute. Because who knows, someday (should you have good reason to show it) they might. But also: you do that because that is your responsibility as a Creator. <\/i>Creation wants to be treated respectfully. If you don\u2019t do so, it will find ways to get back at you. But the important thing is to treat small detail as if it\u2019s as vital as large structure\u2026 because it is\u2026<\/i> and also, because it\u2019s the right thing to do.<\/i><\/p>\n

Meanwhile: glad you\u2019re enjoying the way things are going. It means a lot. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

*Check out, BTW, the online home of the gorgeous workshop of the Cathedral of Our Lady <\/a>in Freiburg im Breisgau in Germany. Here they build new bits of the Fraumuenster to replace the old ones that fall off or get damaged. And you can buy some of the old bits to take home, sometimes, if you want a piece of one of the most exquisite Gothic cathedrals in Europe. The funds go toward continuing repairs and maintenance of the Muenster.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(This post via Tumblr, where it originally appeared.)(And still does, here, but some people don’t care for the new data permissions on Tumblr, and who could blame them?) In a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5476,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-writing"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Backs of the Melons - Out of Ambit<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.dianeduane.com\/outofambit\/2018\/11\/15\/the-backs-of-the-melons\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Backs of the Melons - Out of Ambit\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"(This post via Tumblr, where it originally appeared.)(And still does, here, but some people don’t care for the new data permissions on Tumblr, and who could blame them?) 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