Camp Pep Talk: How to Feed and Water Your Story Seed

Are you tackling a writing project this April at Camp NaNoWriMo? Our incredible participants have words of wisdom to share with their fellow writers. Today, Elizabeth shares how to grow your story seed into something beautiful:

Spring has come at last to the northern hemisphere, so let me rave to you about gardening. The idea you are working on now is a seed. It may be quite small but it contains the glittering story you have always dreamed of writing. 

Yet it will not grow without the proper care.

This precious seed will only grow into a dazzling tale if you first heap upon it a nourishing bed of rich, fecund … word compost. That’s right, word compost. Your story requires you to shovel lots and lots of words onto it, or it will not sprout…

Five thousand words? Ten thousand? 50,000? Whatever your goal, you’ve got to pile up those words. Do not stop until the bed is complete, or a beautiful thing will wither there, lost to the world.

As you add more and more words to your garden bed, you might wonder: is this really going to work? These loads of words are heavy, and they stink! Maybe my seed is a dud, and it will never grow. Maybe a squirrel ate the plot when I wasn’t looking. Maybe it’s nothing but weeds!

Trust me: your story is buried in there somewhere. The word compost is supposed to smell a little bit. It may even contain half-rotten fragments of other stories, which your mind has not finished decomposing. That’s normal. Keep typing, scribbling, or dictating, no matter what.

Be patient if your story is slow to germinate. If you don’t see progress at first, do not assume your seed is a dud and throw out the whole bed. You’ll kill whatever was in there. Just keep going.

When the first tentative story sprouts appear in your garden, do not assume they are weeds and rip them out, no matter how stunted or odd they look. Some of them might be the real thing. You just have to wait until they get bigger to tell for sure.

And if you’re raising a brand new seedling this month, please keep those editorial pruning shears away from the poor thing. Let it grow strong before you start styling the branches, or hacking away with cuts and critiques.

The story you get in the end may not look like what you expected. Don’t be surprised if it doesn’t look like the picture on the packet. Mix-ups happen, because seeds all look kind of the same. But this one is special, because only you can make it grow.

Keep writing. Keep composting. Happy spring.

Elizabeth Heller is 29 and lives in Seattle. She loves stories in all their forms, especially history, photography, cooking, and the natural world. She once passed a medieval history course by writing a crossover of Batman, Dante’s Inferno, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, with proper citations. She hopes someday to own a beehive. Her houseplants desperately need larger pots.

Top photo by Flickr user Jackal of all Trades.