This wasn’t the year I intended to tackle my kitchen’s issues.[*] Travel was on my family’s agenda, and maybe some small home improvement projects—like giving our addition (and more importantly, my office) a long overdue refresh. Our unlovely kitchen, born in 1955 and afflicted with a bad 70s update, could continue waiting its turn for a potentially expensive redo while we pursued more affordable projects.[†] But this year, people…well, it’s not been a good one for plans. Once the pandemic hit, we had to pivot and adjust, then do it again. And this very need to reconsider and revise has a lot do with how my refrigerator’s malfunction led to both a partial kitchen upgrade and some observations about the writing process.
My kitchen (or, at least 3/4 of it). An unholy combination of the 1950s worn cabinetry, a 70s (bad) makeover (see floor), weird choices (brick/paneling), and colors that won’t coordinate. Also, the star of this story, the 1980s fridge.
Appliance Amok
Every story begins with a problem. Ours was a broken refrigerator, an elderly appliance that one day began keeping its contents at decidedly balmy temperatures for bacteria. After some investigation, we decided that it was beyond repair. Thanks to our “garage refrigerator”—a secondhand unit passed along to us by kind relatives in case we needed it—we had some time to find a new one, though we didn’t want to wait too long as this spare was also geriatric. Before the pandemic, we would have researched features and brands, purchased a replacement, and waited for it to be delivered within a week or so. Going from replacing a refrigerator to redoing half the kitchen, however, was something of a plot twist.
Prewriting
Writing, too, starts with a situation in need of resolution. Stemming from “what if” scenarios, intriguing character studies, tidbits of overheard conversations, and various other sources of inspiration teeming in the imagination, these musings coalesce into a story-shaped idea. In this nebulous stage, the story is malleable as its writer grapples with the its viability, characters, plot, and so forth. My own experience with a recent story[‡] required a character to arrive in a place where she used to live but hadn’t visited for some time. Over time, my plan to “get her there” changed from her having some sort of business meeting to GPS rerouting her around traffic. But these changes, driven by a desire to streamline the story and the character’s evolving backstory, were significant. Small details can change everything in the initial plan—such as the size of a refrigerator.
The Kitchen Conundrum
Over the years, my tiny 1950s kitchen only suffered mostly cosmetic (if unfortunate) changes.[§] Touted as an eat-in kitchen, it could just squeeze in a table for two.[**] However, that ill-used space became prime refrigerator real estate once we established that the deceased refrigerator’s alcove limited our options to smaller units—the kind people might panic buy as a spare unit for stocking up extra food for the pandemic. Many of of refrigerators this size (regardless of availability) boasted larger dimensions than our little alcove. We either needed to search more diligently, perhaps in person,[††] or we needed to buy something bigger—with better features—and move it across the room. We decided to abandon our original plan (and floor plan) and found a refrigerator that worked.
And it’s a good thing that we were up to the challenge of revising our plans, because that was just the beginning. But that’s a story for another time.
TL;DR: My refrigerator broke, leading us to change the kitchen layout and (ultimately) update half the room. There are parallels to writing. Go read the whole thing to see the connections.
Updates: On 7 November 2020, I fixed the links for the references. Theoretically, they should work now. On 4 February 2022, photos were re-insterted after they mysteriously disappeared.
NOTES:
[*]So. Many. Issues.
[†]Since we took residence in 2006, we tackled several large projects in our fixer upper, and it seemed like a good time to tackle something smaller. Apparently, we were wrong.
[‡]Currently, I’m working on short stories for this year’s NaNoWriMo.
[§]Arguably the only true improvement to the kitchen was swapping a cabinet for a dishwasher, which we replaced some time ago.
[**]It was mostly wasted space, eventually occupied by waste bins.
[††] Hahaha, no. Although we were in a less restricted phase, we weren’t that keen on going out.
Rita E. Gould: An Artful Sequence of Words 