What is Your Field of Dreams

My Writing Journey Part 11

Do you have a field of dreams?

Yes, it’s a refence to the Kevin Costner movie of the same name.

For instance, is your field of dreams a cultivated field; with rows of plants lined up?

Well-watered and fertilised?

Maybe you prefer to be organic in your approach.

Or is your field of dreams wild, fending for itself and what grows, grows?

Does your field have one crop? Is it a mixed crop?

Does your field have an electric fence? Barbed wire? Post and Rails?

Maybe you had trespassers who didn’t heed the fence or the keep out sign and trampled all over your field causing untold damage.

Maybe your field is unfenced? Open to all comers?

Did you had a field of dreams once; but pests got in and ate the crop?

Or did a natural disaster destroy it?

Or maybe you had a great crop, but the demand wasn’t there, and you end up having to plough it in.

Kevin Costner has a lot to answer for.

(Ok, maybe the director has a lot to answer for.)

That quote.

Yeah, you know the one I mean. There’s farmer Ray out in the cornfield and he hears a voice telling him if he builds it, in this case a baseball diamond, they will come.

Great movie line. Hackneyed and ‘memed’ though.

Of course, people will hand out advice to tell you how you should build your field.

If you build it this way – they will come

If you build it that way – they will come

You need to add this to your field so they will come.

It worked for them, so of course it will work for you.

Maybe.

Maybe not.

One of my field of dreams is to write and publish novels. It doesn’t have to be a big crop. However, I know there is so much prep work involved. At the end of the day I’m not sure if I will have a healthy crop or not. The weeds might choke it out. I can get lots of advice about my field. In the end, though, I have to adapt any information for my own use. But I will keep working on it even though I may have to plough in some parts and start over. There’s no guarantees of course. Nature might be against me. Maybe there will be a decent harvest in time. I won’t know for a while.