Devising, a deviser, someone who divides and forms parts.

Devising, to devise, a word I’ve considered several times; a word that that seems to stand outside of a sentence, an ideas word, a word related to what I feel compelled to do. To devise.

Devise

Devising

A deviser, someone who forms parts, who divides. From the Latin, dividere. Also from the Old French for ‘deviser’ meaning to dispose in portions, to arrange, plan or contrive. Someone who schemes, a schemer.

Any book or play, any song or ballad or poem, folds somehow into parts. It finds itself, its form, —by discrete edges or sections: units, proportions, part 1, part 2, part 3. Devising is an arrangement in time and space that unfolds in the mind of the maker and which must also unfold in the mind of the reader, listener, or viewer. What I devise must be — to some extent — desirable to you as it is desirable to me.

Devising then is related to the limits of my desire: how much I feel for my character and how I feel for them. I fold and intersect with my character along lines of feeling. I divide my character into parts that produce a response in my own imagination. It is easier to work this way, through a set of discrete scenes that begin to amount to something. Scene making often begins with following a character around, watching her move through time and space, allowing her some progress. My character must have a mission, a purpose.

And so I watch Miss Cull hurry one morning to the chemist to get her glasses fixed. Following her about is the beginning of my devising, making my method. My character is apportioned a part by means of a prop. Miss Cull is allocated an identity and purpose by a set of glasses. To begin with she is two glass frames filled with lenses – hers are bent and broken -- and so she scurries one morning to the chemist in the hope that the chemist might be able to fix them. Thus Miss Cull is given her portion of need in the scheme of things, and need makes her move. I watch her move, I follow her about, I start to manipulate her fingers and hands, I animate her. Miss Cull is my puppet coming to life — but a puppet she will not be for long — for Miss Cull now has her purpose. She must go to the chemist before 9am.

That place must be achieved in parts, and it is the relationship between these parts that is the crux of my devising work. I move those parts about. As I do, scenery begins to appear: a driveway with a top and a bottom; hedges; stone lions; gates. Then a route appears, and so I begin to see the outline of trees: Lobs Wood, Maltravers Drive, the places Miss Cull will pass through. These are places I know well, places I have written about before, but places to which I am now allocating new parts, new roles. For this is fiction, and fiction divides us off from the real even while it looks to attach to things already known — old ground, known objects, familiar territory —- those glasses, that chemist. I have these objects and places stored away in memory — that prop box I readily rummage about in — but I am now rearranging and reallocating my props. I am giving them new parts, aspects of experience I deliberately divide from myself — as I push away from me and move towards my character — her movements, her purpose, her means of seeing the world.

Lions – driveway – Miss Cull – glasses.

Lions – stone noses – driveway bottom.

Miss Cull – lions – stone noses – bottom of driveway (hedges).

Miss Cull – glasses – lions – stone noses – driveway (gate, hedges).

Miss Cull- glasses – lions – noses – driveway – chemist (Lobs wood – Maltravers Drive route – Miss Cull hurrying. Miss Cull beginning to speak of her purpose through a me that is Not Me. A narrator.

The Lions: carved from stone and roaring; roaring from stone, the lions at the bottom of the driveway. Miss Cull tapped their nose as she passed one morning on the way to get her glasses fixed. The frames had broken, and it was a matter of emergency she find the man at the back of the chemist and make him come out and take responsibility for what he hadn't done, which was strap the lenses in as tightly as she had hoped. Miss Cull lived in hope; what else is there?