I’m a hobbyist gardener—meaning my house is overrun with succulents, most of which live in random thrift store containers.
I find a lot of parallels between gardening and writing. No, I don’t mean the usual schmaltz about “nurturing your writer’s soul” or “planting seeds of hope.” I’m thinking more specifically about my writing process.
Every short story I write begins as a seed. An idea. Sometimes it blossoms into an entire story right off the bat. More often, I won’t even start writing for weeks or months as the idea takes root in my mind. Then I write a crappy, disappointing first draft that doesn’t do the idea justice. Then I let the seedling grow a little more. When it’s big and strong enough, I return to the draft and flesh it out. Then I take another break, sprinkle more water on my idea, return for more revisions, and so on until I have a shiny little shrub of a story.
There’s a lot of writing and editing involved in every story—but that’s only half of the process. The other half happens behind the scenes. It happens when I’m talking through plot holes in the shower or brainstorming aloud on my drive to work. It happens in my dreams. Sometimes I don’t even see it happening, and a new idea just shows up at the doorstep of my subconscious. These wayward ideas often have the same look as the half-dead succulent I found on clearance at Home Depot: sad, bedraggled, but a tiny bit hopeful. With time and effort, I can nurture that idea into a full story, or sometimes multiple stories—just as I did with the clearance succulent, which I not only revived, but also propagated into dozens of new plants.
I’ve also found that, the more gardening I do, the more plants work their way into my fiction. In the past year, I’ve written short stories about a forest with a mind of its own, a tree whose roots leak toxic magic into a river, and a dystopian future where mutated plants have taken over the world. I’m sensing a theme here…
But I’m not complaining. Plants can be powerful symbols, as well as wonderful worldbuilding elements in speculative fiction. I think they often get overlooked because, to us, they’re like furniture. They don’t move, speak, or have motivations like humans, animals, and aliens. But I’ve read many fantastic books that use plants in unexpected ways.
Take the Gibbering Grove, a living forest that collects all the secrets in the world, in Carrie Ryan and John Parke Davis’s A Map to Everywhere. Or J.A. White’s titular Thickety, a magical forest which must be constantly cut back to prevent it from taking over the village. Or the villainous tree—and its equally villainous caretaker—in Jonathan Auxier’s The Night Gardener. These plants play integral roles in their stories, shaping the plot, affecting the characters, and breathing life into the novel.
I plan to continue nurturing my plants, in the hope that they’ll keep nurturing my ideas.
