‘Bedrock’

I can remember as a kid walking past a building site near to where I grew up. It wasn’t anything special really, just a site where they were putting up a couple of houses. But today for some reason I found myself thinking of that time as a kid walking past the site every day as the houses slowly came together.

You the first thing I noticed as a kid, what told me that the ‘waste ground’ as we knew it was being transformed into something useful?

It was a hole in the ground! (but not this one, this is from a famous movie set)

Rather it was a trench. Or at least that’s how it started. No JCBs on-site, no diggers, I’m not sure the builder could afford one, and it was only two houses they were building, but a hole that became a trench, and over a few months things began to change. A building began to take shape, but the hole had to be dug first.

And it had to be dug according to a plan, you couldn’t just dig anywhere, a plan had to be followed.

As I’m writing I remember my Dad telling me a story of a building site he worked on just after he came out of the Army. They’d had this old fella start and the first job they gave him was to dig some foundations.

The site was all marked out as to where he was to dig, and the foreman went through the details of where to dig and all that, they left the man to it as the rest of them got on with work in a different part of the site.

A couple of hours later the man went and told them he’d finished the job and asked: “what’s next?”

The foreman, knowing there was no way he could have dug the foundations that quickly went to check. There was a hole, there were lots of them, but none of them joined up, and none were where they should be.

Needless to say, the man didn’t have a job after that!

That got me thinking.

The last few years I’ve been writing books and enjoying the writing, but there hasn’t been that much of a plan. I’ve had an idea of where I want to go, but no clue as to how I’m going to get there.

See, it’s not just about having the basics right, it’s also about having some form of plan and working that plan to get where you want to go. The builders had to follow the plan to build the house, first the foundations dug, they had to go right down, depending on how tall the house was going to be dictated how deep the foundations had to go, a general rule was and still is for every foot high you go you need to go six inches down, that is until you reach ‘Bedrock’

What’s Bedrock?

A quick way to explain it is to go take a look outside your door, the earth you’re seeing there is what’s called ‘topsoil’. Great for growing things in, but it’s basically silt washed down off the hills and mountains and not good for building on as it moves all the time.

About eight inches down you’ll come across a damp layer of pliable clay, it can seem pretty hard at times, but if it’s been raining (and in England where I grew up it always rains) it’s wet and malleable, useless for growing stuff, but also not that great for building on unless you’ve got a lot of it.

Down below that, about six to eight feet down you come across rocks, small ones at first, but eventually you come across a solid lump, that’s the ‘Bedrock’ and EVERY major building on Earth goes down that far, the literally anchor the buildings into it.

But you can’t just ‘dig down’ and hope for the best. You’ve got to have a plan, not just an idea, but a plan of how you’re going to work down there to put the building up that you want to build.

You know, it’s the same for pretty much every situation! You’ve got to have a plan, not just an idea of where you want to go, but a plan of how you’re going to get there. The plan can be flexible, but you still need it otherwise you’re like the old man in the story, digging holes everywhere, but none where they should be.

The last few weeks that’s what I realised, I’ve been ‘digging the holes’ but they aren’t necessarily the ones I needed for the plan, that changed a few weeks ago, from now on’ it’s back to working out what the plan is and building on it.

The ‘gurus’ tell us that part of the ‘bedrock’ for any writer, and especially one who’s self-publishing has to be their blog or presence on the web. All the rest might be nice, might even feel good, but it needs to be built on the ‘bedrock’ of the blog or ‘newsletter’ as you can call it, and that’s all part of the changes that we talked about last week.

How about you? Have you thought about your plan? Where do you want to be in five years?

Just a question.

Blessings

Lawrence