Forget-me-nots in my garden

Those of you who have followed “…on Anything, Really” for a while may have picked up that I am into my garden.

It’s definitely a “real” garden, too, which means that it’s not easy care, particularly in spring when all winter’s “stealth” weeds suddenly burgeon “full throttle.”.

So a few years back, when I was storm-tossed on the vasty deeps of writing Daughter of Blood, the garden and those unstealthy weeds did rather get away from me—but I remember a friend assuring me that “gardens are patient.”

“Just now the wisteria…”

It occurred to me then that books are also patient, in the sense that an idea can lie fallow waiting for the right time to take shape, and even once the process of writing begins, it can take time and the passage of seasons for the work to come to reach its full growth.

And it requires patience to work through that process, and a willingness to do what I call listening to the story, as well as trust that a book will emerge at the end of the journey.

So I do feel there is a lot of overlap between the creative processes of writing and gardening. But they intersect in other ways as well.

Writing is cerebral, it’s about ideas and giving those ideas flesh, but only through words set down on paper or in noughts and ones on a computer screen.

Gardening is physical: it’s about getting out into the sun and fresh air, working with dirt and tools and watching living things grow and develop according to their own internal rules and mysterious (to the observer) natures.

Hebe & bumblebee

But the two complement each other. There is certainly nothing like getting out in the garden to shake loose a recalcitrant idea or resolve a gnarly plot or character development issue. It’s something about the physicality, but also the rhythm of garden work.

Yet I find the vision of the writing process, the ability to envisage worlds, both at the broad brush and also detail level, stands me in good stead when making decisions about the shape of the garden.

Of course, there’s nothing new in any of this. Writers have been gardening and writing about it pretty much since writing was invented. But I’m glad to have experienced the reality for myself.