Making Something Out of Chaos

by Jennifer Young

Mayhem at the boat stop...

In the midst of mayhem, there’s usually some kind of method. 

This dawned on me on holiday. I was standing by the side of Lake Maggiore trying to board a boat to Isola Bella — something which ought to be pretty simple. You buy your ticket and set off for the pier and…oh. 

There are four piers. One is for the big lake steamers, and the other three, to which we were directed, are for the flotilla of smaller boats that ferry visitors out to the island — and to many other destinations. And they all come in and out, with a turnaround of minutes, at any one of these three piers, not one of which gives any indication as to which of the many small villages they’re going to, or in which order (which matters, because every ticket is different). 

The milling crowd around these piers might be going anywhere, in any combination of stops. No-one seems to know which boat is going to come in at which pier. But the tickets are different colours, so the system works like this. 

But we got there in the end!

The boat comes in and the boatman holds up a ticket. Let’s say it’s green. You have a green ticket so you rush over towards him, holding your ticket up in turn. He beckons you out of the crowd of people waving blue or pink tickets, examines your ticket and sends you away, because you have the wrong green ticket. So you try again and again until you get the right boat with the right green ticket. 

This works if there’s one boat coming in at one pier at any given time. But when boats are coming and going at several piers it’s complete chaos. On the day we attempted the journey, the lake shore was full of people running up and down waving different coloured ticket and shouting at the top of their voices. Baveno? Isola Madre? Villa Taranto?

Sometimes, plotting a novel feels exactly like that — a complete chaos of random thoughts, ideas, characters and events, all jostling around a skeleton structure of a plot. 

The Lake Maggiore experience worked fine in the end, or I think it did. (I’m not sure we did get the right boat for the return journey, but we ended up where we wanted, so it didn’t matter.) Plots are  bit less defined, and most of the time I end up somewhere I never intended to go. 

But isn’t that part of the fun?