Writing. Gardening.

 All winter I dream of the garden I will make come spring. Mostly I dream of great results, and I spend a lot of time perusing catalogs and glossy magazines featuring landscapes that bear no resemblance whatsoever to that supported by my modest city lot. And I don’t ever, ever envision any weeding, spending money, any real work.  I don’t imagine thorns or disappointment or digging. I dupe myself happily. I feel, somehow, my creative vision will be….enough to produce a beautiful landscape! Dream, winter, dream, winter…pleasing.

Then, in spring, there’s the real actual lawn. One day it appears like someone you are related to and do not like. Potted with weird patchy places, pocked with weeds—garlic mustard is taking OVER. Whose lawn is this? Sticks, the mush that is the under-cared for peony. A dead rose bush. A limpid dogwood. Immediately, I want to go to the garden store and buy new plants and cute pink flowered gloves and some tool that will magically take the dandelions out, with no actual effort on my part. All I have to do is buy the tool and put it in my garage and the dandelions will take flight and become angels and never come back in dandelion form.

Reality. It all seems daunting. Simply too hard to start. The distance between what I envision and what I am willing to do is simply too vast and frightening like any good old abyss.

Then, one morning, I’m bringing in groceries. There is garlic mustard nearly TOUCHING MY BACK DOOR. I set down the bag of groceries. And I decide to just simply do this one small thing: get the garlic mustard out of the daffodil bed by my back door.

Weirdly, quickly, it’s really incredibly pleasing—feeling my body work, bending, yanking the evil right out…and then I see ivy climbing the house, and it’s incredibly fun to pull it off, like unzipping something. Giant runners lead me into more ivy, more stranglings and it’s so satisfying to yank! Uproot! This flurry of industry leads to more garlic mustard pulling—why not just divide the yard, I’m thinking now, into sections, and do this part here that goes all the way over to the air conditioning unit? I get from the garage a giant bag plastic eco bag purchased expressly for the purpose of holding weedy things as I pull out their brethren (Smith and Hawken, fifty bucks, years ago) and not for the purpose of garage decoration, which is what I have been using it for…then it seems like the more fun task will be to fill the bag! I will fill the bag with sticks and detritus and weeks==any weeds in my path are fair game! This requires getting the clippers and the nippers—oh nipping! Oh clipping!

Pretty soon, hours have gone by.

It’s so striking to me how this is exactly like our writing lives.  

When we think about writing a book, working on a book, or even just writing today, I think it’s often too overwhelming for the creative brain. Too much, too much. It’s more than just a question of “where to start.” There is something more existentially heavy here, I think.    Some combination of: What is the point of starting? I’ll never finish. And there are so many good books. I’ve already written a book. What’s the point? It’s too hard. I haven’t read enough. I should be ______.  I don’t know how to start. My studio is in disarray. I know I have taken vital notes…and I don’t know where they are…

I read and read and read, novels and poems and histories, and these books are like the seed catalogs: so beautiful. So perfect. So unlike anything I have to offer or could possibly match, here on my narrow, tender, quite small city lot.

The book project I’m working on often feels to me just like the yard-in-spring. Great potential. Wrapped in impenetrable and punishing rinds of disaster.

I let the garden go last year—I don’t deserve a good garden. It’s too hard to make this yard beautiful! I’m not even going to be here this summer! I’ll never have time! Anything I do now will die and become undone before I get back! My whole house could burn down! There are so many things I should be doing! EVERYTHING IS IN SHAMBLES. PEOPLE COULD DIE!

When I substitute the word “book” for “garden” I see familiar ground. Once I get started on writing, I find all kinds of interesting things to do with writing for hours and hours and hours—one thing leads to another and I can’t imagine leaving the studio because THERE IS SO MUCH TO DO.  And so then I have THAT happy problem!

I notice that what works best for my process is to come in sideways—to not really “start the project”—but slide in, while bringing in groceries, because something brushed against my leg, something was uttered, something just couldn’t not be put into words (or the expensive Smith and Hawken weed holder thing) any longer.

When I make a plan: GARDEN FOR TWO HOURS EVERY DAY or WRITE 1200 WORDS PER DAY very little happens the first day and then I forget I even had the plan at all, and the callouses of guilt build ever thicker.

But once I start on a very very tiny and very delicious task, one that I really want to do, and that has immediate reward, once I get my hands dirty,  one thing leads to another….and the days pass that way, in focus.

Work is good. I think our talent as writers comes from figuring out how to figure out how to work. How to start working, how to manage working, how to pace working, how to sustain working.