Writing and Gardening
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Greetings, writers—
There’s really no end to the cute sayings about what writing’s like [manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe (John Gregory Dunne); thinking through my fingers (Isaac Asimov); the gathering in of connotations; the harvesting of them, like blackberries in a good season, ripe and heavy, snatched from among the thorns of logic. (Fay Weldon)].
I can see bits of truth in all of these (though I’m not sure about the thorns of logic business), but as I stand on the sidewalk every evening to admire the flowers in front of my house, I think, well, what about gardening? Could you argue that writing is like gardening—or its opposite? It depends on who you ask.
Writing fiction, suggests Australian writer Kathryn Heyman, is “like growing root vegetables, with so much work going on beneath the surface. And like gardening, occasional tending is required before the harvest. Nothing onerous - plucking off some insects, clearing a weed or two, providing water. With fiction (because now we have reached the end of my gardening knowledge) the waiting is less weeding and more showing up, periodically visiting the idea. Listening and waiting, that’s what this is.”
I think she makes writing sounds a lot easier than it is, at least for me (“nothing onerous,” as if!) but as I’ve said before, showing up is the important part, and she seems to agree with that.
Ursula LeGuin says thinking about writing as gardening can be quite “useful.”
You plant the seeds, but each plant will take its own way and shape. The gardener’s in control, yes; but plants are living, willful things. Every story has to find its own way to the light. Your great tool as a gardener is your imagination…
What’s important when you start is simply this: you have a story you want to tell. A seedling that wants to grow. Something in your inner experience is forcing itself up toward the light. Attentively and carefully and patiently, you can encourage that, let it happen. Don’t force it; trust it. Watch it, water it, let it grow.
As you write a story, if you can let it become itself, tell itself fully and truly, you may discover what it’s really about. what it says, why you wanted to tell it. It may be a surprise to you. You may have thought you planted a dahlia, and look what came up, an eggplant! Fiction is not information transmission; it is message-sending.
More watching and waiting, and some “let[ting] it become itself.” Where is the labor and the sweat and the digging?! Still, who amongst us hasn’t had the dahlia-eggplant experience?
According to May Sarton (Plant Dreaming Deep; Journal of a Solitude; The Fur Person), “Gardening is like poetry in that it is gratuitous, and also that it cannot be done on will alone. What will can do, and the only thing it can do, is make time in which to do it. Young poets, enraged because they don’t get published right away, confuse what will can do and what it can’t. It can’t make a tree peony grow to twelve feet in a year or two, and it can’t force the attention of editors and publishers. What it can do is create the space necessary for achievement, little by little.”
Okay, here we get at least a nod toward effort and will.
And Naheed Phiroze Patel (A Mirror Made of Rain) writes the following:
The social life of plants and trees—the ways a garden speaks to itself and about itself—taught me how to note the subtle subterranean interpolations between character, setting, action, point of view, conflict, etc., in a novel. Narrative elements need time to strengthen and coalesce together like roots and fungi before the story can finally bloom out. As I spent the summer and fall outdoors in the garden, and indoors on my novel, I noticed a welcome change in my creative anxiety. I expended less time and energy on authorial control, more on observing with a lightly held sense of curiosity.
By just showing up, by attending to the dirt, to the page, I could sow words and make them germinate. If they don’t grow into the story I’d envisioned, so be it.
Okay, showing up again! And I like how gardening encouraged her to think about “subterranean interpolations between character, setting, action…”
But Rebecca Solnit, in Orwell’s Roses, seems to suggest that gardening is more like antidote for writing.
A garden offers the opposite of the disembodied uncertainties of writing. It’s vivid to all the senses, it’s a space of bodily labor, of getting dirty in the best and most literal way, an opportunity to see immediate and unarguable effect… To spend time frequently with these direct experiences is clarifying, a way of stepping out of the whirlpools of words and the confusion they can whip up. In an age of lies and illusions, the garden is one way to ground yourself in the realm of the processes of growth and the passage of time, the rules of physics, meteorology, hydrology, and biology, and the realms of the senses.
What do you think? If you had to come up with an extended metaphor to describe your writing process, what would it be?
P.S. I can’t take any credit for the flowers I love. My friend Julie, who is a master gardener, has been helping me with my tiny patch of plantable land this spring. And by helping me I mean doing absolutely everything, from driving by the house at each hour of the day to check sunlight levels, thinking exhaustively about the best varieties of plants (penstemon is lovely, sure, but have you seen “Dark Towers”?), sourcing the plants, arranging them, planting them in carefully amended soil, and sometimes even watering them. My gratitude is basically infinite.