A neighbor was out walking her dog one evening as Miss Crankypants sat on her front yard. The neighbor stopped to admire Miss CP’s dahlias, then politely asked what she was doing. “Why, I’m simply demossing the grass,” she replied, her fingertips buried in the green fescue.
Neighbor’s jaw dropped open. Her dog stopped peeing on my bushes. “What? You pick moss out of your grass by hand?” Laughing hysterically, she and her pooch sauntered off before Miss CP could explain.
Writers everywhere know the rule is to RUE (Resist the Urge to Explain). But Miss Crankypants is NOT dumb enough to sit around doing stupid pointless things for no apparent reason. That’s what political conventions are for!
She isn’t only helping the poor little grass blades breathe by plucking out the strangling moss. She’s solving plot problems, creating character arcs and doing the great mental work that makes all novelists seem like they’re doing diddley-squat. We novelists could take on theoretical physicists in the old thinking cap department.
Moss picking just happens to be the way Miss Crankypants daydreams. Her family is always trying to get her into a home where they can cure her moss-fixation, but it never works.

Here’s why!

Every writer on the planet has been rudely interrupted from a killer wool-gathering session. Can I get an Amen? How about a B-a-a? Loved ones and coworkers tend to think the writer is doing exactly nothing, zippo. Really? Don’t they realize that writer is probably mentally constructing the framework for the next Great American Novel?
Writers are nothing without daydreaming! Melville might’ve come up with a purple whale (Moby Grape? Oh wait, it’s been done), Dickens would end up with Tiny Jim and Mark Twain–well instead of a raft, Tom & Huck might have run away on an inflatable kayak.
If that neighbor and her insufferable little yapper dare to come past Miss Crankypants’ yard tonight, she’ll pretend to be planting something. You can’t expect the rest of the world to understand the mind of a creative genius. She’ll just have to do her mosspicking and her daydreaming after dark.