A Different Kind Of Garden

Sometimes you want to grow a certain plant and you just cannot. Come on, you know you have tried and failed at growing something in your garden.
I have. I have said before that a Master Gardener is someone who has killed more plants than you. I am not a Master Gardener, but I have killed my share of plants.
Maybe your soil is wrong for that plant. Maybe the spot where you put it doesn't get enough sun; or it gets too much. The number of variables is staggering, especially when you consider the number of possible plants to plant and their unique needs.
And sometimes you cannot even have a garden. Sometimes you lose your house in the divorce and you end up in a small apartment where the only window available faces East and your neighbor who has the South-facing balcony is a total ass and won't let you put your beloved potted baby Sassafras tree there...er...but I digress.
What is a gardener to do? Without resorting to the tired cliche of drawing parallels with gardening and life, I suggest to you to try a different kind of gardening. Grow something other than plants in the same way you grow a garden. After all, if you strip gardening to its core, is it not just the cyclical application of effort to gain an expected payout?

So after thinking a bit about it I decided to use the principles of vegetable gardening on my admittedly mediocre writing. You see, for a long time I didn't consider myself a writer. To me, a writer was Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Stephen King, J.K. Rowling. I believed that a writer was a wizard endowed by providence and possessing skills and knowledge not available to mortals. It never occurred to me that a writer was simply someone who writes. My perception began to change when a friend (and possibly the only person who reads this blog) suggested to me that I was a writer.  I began researching writing as a thing and I was shocked to learn that all writers, including the giants, talked about putting words on paper as a discipline not as an art (could it be argued that all art is discipline?). A discipline? You mean, like growing plants?

Thus I have decided to look at writing like I do gardening. Learn words like I learned plants. See what it is required to grow a tale from seed to flower to fruit. Learn the sun requirements of noun and verb and amend the soil until an idea grows into story. Step by step, word by word, until the day when what I have put on paper bushes like an out of control tomato plant.

Yes, that I can do.

Thank you for stopping by!