Writing Like My Garden Grows

By Lisa Alber

Mimulus, an annual that survived the winter.

It’s gardening season again. Every year I meet the garden all over again, saying hello to the new hosta and lily shoots, cheering the cosmos sprouts coming up from seeds. There’s always a few happy surprises, like the checkered lilies that bloomed after a late season transplant last year and annuals that somehow made it through the winter. There’s always new challenges. Mourning the hibiscus that didn’t make it, grunting at the forget-me-nots and bluebells that want to take over everything, railing against slugs that decimated two delphiniums. It’s an ever-changing palette of colors, textures, and layers from year to year, and month to month during the season.

The thing about gardening, for me, is that it’s all about process. It’s a long-winded process. I’ll never get to the end. I started with the basics: clearing the yard of overgrown everything, junkyard detritus, a giant diseased cedar (sadly), and weeds. Learning as I went — the craft of it, you might say. Every year I challenge myself a little more. And every year, my garden grows more beautiful. The process brings to mind a fantastic word:

I’m coddiwompling my way forward with the garden the way I coddiwomple each new novel and my writing career in general. With each story, I meet the writing process all over again. Saying hello to the fresh-faced characters; railing against plot points that won’t make themselves clear; challenging myself with story structure or point of view. Hopefully, my craft is improving the way my garden grows more beautiful.

If nothing else, gardening illustrates how the process can be an end in itself. The garden doesn’t need to achieve anything. I always hope for lots of colorful flowers through the season, and that’s about it. I can’t control what happens, just like I can’t control my characters sometimes. Gotta pivot. Re-think. Transplant.

Checkered lily.

I have a new motto: gardening is transplanting. I plant new flowers every year, and sometimes I don’t place them correctly. They don’t thrive. They need more sun, or less. So, every year, I transplant, and every year there’s more to move around because I’m always buying new plants. And there’s a domino effect too. Last week I transplanted two languishing hydrangea to a sunnier spot where a clerodendrum (a.k.a. peanut butter tree) had died. In one of the empty hydrangea spots I transplanted a bleeding heart that wasn’t happy because it was getting too much sun.

The process takes patience and stamina. Just like revision. I have a motto about that too: writing is revision. Anyone can write a first draft, but revision is where the real work happens to make a story its best (publishable!) self. I change one aspect of a story and the domino effect rolls through every chapter. Recently, I realized my character Tessa’s internal arc wasn’t strong enough. I amped it up. Had to revise nearly every chapter to accommodate the pivot I made.

Bluebell

Transplanting is a revision, and revision — re-seeing — makes the garden more glorious. Sometimes it takes a few attempts to get it right, but eventually I figure out the best plant placement just like I figure out my vague plots. It’s not that I don’t get grumpy sometimes. Sometimes I don’t want to dig a hole in hard earth. BUT: The work itself, the slog, turns into flow. And flow is good. Once I get going (procrastination is forever an issue, whether transplanting or writing), with my hands in the soil or my mind inside a character’s head, I can go for awhile, and I’m content at the end of the session. In the garden, it’s easy to see my progress and so satisfying. In the work-in-progress, I can see that I made it through some page count. This is something even if I don’t know whether the revisions are any good.

But then, when I transplant, I don’t know whether the plant is going to thrive either. And if it doesn’t, I try another spot. And so it goes.

Bleeding heart and forget-me-nots

I almost wrote a blog post about languishing. A languishing plant, a languishing manuscript or career, many of us languishing during the pandemic. I found this article helpful. (The NYT piece is better, but it’s blocked, at least for me.)

But the garden isn’t languishing. The garden is buoyant and fully alive. And I’m hopeful for my writing too.