What Gardening Teaches Us About Writing
The weather is warming up, which means it’s gardening season! In between edits and my own writing, I am sneaking peeks at the tiny buds popping through the soil of homemade seed starters in my window, planning out my raised beds, and trying to find the best cutting flowers to grow in pots. I’m a woman obsessed.
In my attempts at gardening over the years, I’ve found that it has taught me a few things that I have brought back to my writing practice. Here are a few writing tips we can learn from gardening:
Patience will be rewarded. If you plant seeds too early, frost will attack them, and they’ll be dead before they’ve even begun. If you try to move a plant into a pot that’s too big for it, it might get stunted. Even if you want to buy $100 worth of seeds and plant your tomatoes on the first warm day of spring, you must slow down and be patient. Writing a novel or book-length manuscript is no different; it’s a looooooooooong game. It can take years for a book to go from the first idea to the final draft. While it can be alluring to rush through parts of the process, accepting the long game opens up a writer’s ability to dig deeper, go further, and get to the heart of your story.
Every plant needs the right conditions to grow. Maybe you need to write before everyone else gets up in the morning. Maybe you can’t write at your house. Maybe you can only write if your kids are in bed and you have a cup of tea by your desk. Every writer, and really every story, needs the right conditions to work. Those conditions vary from person to person and story to story. Like writing, there are a lot of opinions out there about gardening. While some of those opinions are useful, ignore the advice that doesn’t feel right to you and give yourself room to explore what conditions you need for your stories to grow.
Sometimes, seedlings just don’t work out. In gardening, you can create the perfect conditions for a seed to germinate, and it still won’t grow. Writing is no different. You can work terribly hard at something and have it never really come alive. Even if you’ve done everything you were supposed to. Even if you thought a story or subplot was going to work, had confidence about it for many drafts, sometimes it still doesn’t work. This is a part of writing. I tried to grow dahlias from seed this year, and at first, they were exploding from the soil. Then, no matter how hard I tried to salvage them, they just didn’t take. BUT…
Composting a dead plant will build fertile soil. No writing is wasted. It may feel that way, but no writing is wasted. When you’ve worked at a story and reworked a story, and it’s still not working, freeing yourself from continuing to work on it will open doors to new stories. And all that work you put into it will only feed your knowledge and skill when you begin something new. You’ve created fertile soil for your next story. And, as in writing, sometimes those seeds come back and bloom when you least expect it.
Denise Santomauro is a writer, editor, and author coach. When not playing with her adorable dog, she can be found teaching herself how to garden and growing way too many tomato plants.