Just do something! What writing and gardening have in common.

Recently, as I finished a final round of edits on CROOKED LITTLE LIES, my novel that is coming out shortly from Amazon/Lake Union, I was also putting in the major elements of the garden that has been in the planning stages since I moved out to the country a year ago, and I was thinking how similar the two occupations are. Either undertaking begins with a thought, an idea, an image, some whisper of something that sends you out the door or to the desk. Notes are jotted down. Sketches are made. Plans are put into action. Sometimes you hit a wall. Out here in the country, in particular, where there aren’t the usual parameters, like sidewalks, driveways and privacy fences, to define the area, I’m often stumped. How far should I take the limestone dry-stack wall? What, exactly, should the cedar rail fence with its adorable peaked arbor encompass? I go outside and stare, trying to decide. It’s very like sitting at my computer, wondering which way to take a plot or a character in a story.

Gardener’s block and writer’s block have a lot in common. There’s a certain despair, rising levels of frustration and anxiety. I can almost see this little person in my head pacing the floor, wringing her hands. Until a voice speaks up, yelling: Just do something! In the case of writing it means type a sentence even if it’s gibberish. In the garden, it might mean getting a few rocks, adding them to the existing wall and stepping back to evaluate. Or it might mean digging up that entire clump of daylilies, because they’re in the wrong place. It can get complicated with crafting a story, too, requiring of anything from ripping out an entire plotline to totally changing an ending.

Built from cedar harvested on the property, this little arbor
 in January looks pretty bare, but it has lots of potential.

And the two processes also share similarities in the method by which either one is created. Both start with good bones. In the garden, I begin with hardscaping, a wall, a length of fence, statuary or a pergola—some focal point to build around. In story writing I begin if not with a fully fleshed synopsis then at least I will have the bones of an idea. And in either case, for me, anyway, the bones need to be strong and compelling. I need an ocean’s worth of enthusiasm, because either way, I‘m going to be lost in this muddy, unknown territory for awhile. Either project is going to take time to complete, and there are bound to be setbacks, small heartbreaks and jabs of disappointment, never mind the odd bouts of confusion, the times I grope around wondering wondering where I am. It’s as easy to garden your way into a corner, as it is to write your way into one. 

But there is one difference between the two occupations, one that I discovered only now, as I sent CROOKED LITTLE LIES back to my lovely editor for the last time. I went outside to the garden, my go-to place. It’s always been my sanctuary even as it can be the greatest source for distress, and as I

This is Sophia, my beautiful garden muse,
found this spring. 

was looking over results of my early spring efforts so far, and feeling impatient that the perennials are so small, that the shrubs haven’t filled in, that the trees will need their canvas-strap supports for another six months and I hate how it looks, the word STOP! popped into my head. A voice continued: You’re missing it, the beauty now. The beauty of beginning, of watching something grow. It often happens that I’ll hear this voice, my higher self, the one that knows how to find the joy in life. And I’m so grateful for it, to have cultivated it so it’s usually louder than the voice of my frustration. It’s this voice, what I’ve come to think of as the voice of my joy, that sees me through the hard places in life. It’s there whenever I care to listen no matter what I’m doing, and definitely whether I’m writing or gardening. But back to the difference between them, standing in the garden that day, while I did slow down and let my vision fill with the beauty that is already in evidence, that little voice spoke up again to whisper that while the book was finished, the garden, like so many other gardens I’ve begun in my lifetime, never will be done. I will always walk outside and see something I want to do there. In fact, I will quite possibly die thinking of the phlox or some other clump of whatever flowers, how tomorrow I will move them as they have overgrown their place in the border. And perhaps that is a garden’s value, that one is never finished conspiring with nature over its creation. It comforted me, even elated me, having that thought. And I guess it does share a similarity with writing after all. I can’t see how I’ll ever be finished with conjuring plots, either, for the characters that continue to get up and walk around in my head.

The Story House, Chapter 3 - Found Treasure

The view opens from the moment you pull into the drive and is
now visible from almost every vantage point of future homesite
and garden shed

On some days, I can’t decide if moving onto this property was the craziest, dumbest idea I ever had or the most joyous and perfect. There are moments when I’m just overwhelmed by all the challenges, along with the potential that seems to exceed the limit of imagination, and I wonder what ledge I’ve stepped off, whether there will be an end to the learning curve. But the moments of delight that are liberally sprinkled throughout the shadows of uncertainty, of pure frustration, are irresistible, and I’m pulled by them. Like finding the old barbed wire speared dead center through the cluster of live oaks that stands between my garden shed and what will be the front porch of my house. We think as long as 50 years ago, or more likely longer, someone put up a fence alongside the oaks, close enough to the trees that over time they grew around it, absorbing the wire, healing the wounds it must have caused. We unearthed a few of the cedar posts, too, and found them to be only somewhat rotted, which shows just how impervious cedar (or more accurately Ashe juniper) is to weather and time.

I knew I wanted to find a way to use the wire, to preserve it. It’s like the horseshoe I found and set on my front step, and the chair we found abandoned underneath one of the oldest oaks on the property that some hunter left behind. I pulled it up to sit beside my front porch for the time being. I’m amazed at how sturdy it still is. The things I’ve discovered here, from the clumps of pink-blooming wild flowers in full bloom for weeks now without a single ounce of my effort, to the fox burrow, to the shimmering tail feather a chaparral shed near the birdbath, is a link in the chain of this land’s history. Such finds set me to dreaming; they tell me a story. Even the gorgeous view that has widened with every cedar tree we cut down sets my mind off, wondering who might have stood here in this very spot a hundred, two hundred, a thousand years ago. Did they see what I see? Did their hearts rise? Were they overcome by a fierce wish to protect this land as I am? A few things they wouldn’t have seen a thousand years ago are the thick overgrowth of Ashe juniper and the barbed wire. Neither is native. But for better or worse, each has had their chapter in this land’s history. They’ve left a mark on its soul.

As for the use of the wire, what to do with it came to me the way a story does, in a sudden image. But instead of a character or a situation, I saw a wreath, studded with flowers. Weeks before, without knowing what I might do with them, I’d bought some vintage looking, painted metal flowers, and on the day I conceived the idea, David and Chris happened to be welding the roof structure onto the shipping containers David is remodeling into a house. So I took my length of wire down to them, and after David formed the hoops, Chris welded them in place, then I brought my found treasure home, wired on the flowers, and twined a garland made from finer wire through the hoop. The entire project took an afternoon and now on the door of my garden shed hangs a reminder of that old fence.

I look at it and wonder about the man who built it, his purpose for doing so, whether his plan came to fruition ... what happened to him and his family. Sometimes, when I sit on my porch steps, staring off into the blue distance, I can hear the voices of the ones who were here before me, whispering, telling their stories, weaving them from the lively, determined wind, and I lose myself in the sound.   

A tiny nest for grand creating

I have always loved making a home and for me, the experience of doing this begins at the street’s edge and extends to the limit of my view and ability and right to design to my taste the sort of story I want to tell, to share with passersby and visitors alike. I never used to think of designing a home in that way, that in bringing together elements we love, and collecting and arranging them just so, we are really telling a story about ourselves. We are teaching and learning and expressing who we are. What is that if not a story? It may even speak louder than our voices if it’s true that a picture is worth a thousand words. I know people who come into my home know me. They see the stuff I’ve dragged in here, from bird’s nests, to beetles, to a gorgeous antique French armoire and a tattered leather-bound edition of a novel titled Lucile that was in my great-grandparents’ library and they get a sense of who I am. Possibly that I like nature and old things and gardens, all of which is true.

There are days when being creative at writing fails me. I think its resistance. I am determined to tell the story in my head, the one that’s going to make a novel, but my brain refuses to cooperate. If perseverance doesn’t break down the barrier, I leave the writing and find a project. I get into my stuff, my home stuff, and I play. I add to my nest. I am like a bird bringing the new new bit of straw, or a dried flower, or a tuft of lint from the drier that caught on the grass, into my little place. I’m weaving a different sort of story, but for me it’s a story all the same. It’s as if my muse appreciates a different venue, another way to find expression. Often the resistance dissolves in the happy light of doing this, of making new art.

The other day, a very dear friend of mine, knowing our shared love of making a home, recommended a magazine, Romantic Prairie Style, and in it I found a tiny poem that perfectly expresses the way I feel, and in such an economy of words, I am in awe. It is called My Home and it’s by Ella Wheeler Wilcox:

This is the place that I love best,
A little brown house, like a ground-birds nest,
Hid among grasses, and vines, and trees,
Summer retreat of the birds and bees.
Far from the city’s dust and heat,
I get but sounds and odors sweet.
Who can wonder I love to stay,
Week after week, here hidden away,
In this sly nook that I love the best—
This little brown house like a ground-bird’s nest?

James Prosek's creative nest

Another very dear friend, Guida Jackson, without whose mentorship I might never have become a writer, commented recently on something I posted on Facebook about tiny homes. She said my fascination with them and all things tiny reminded her of an interview she heard on NPR with an artist, James Prosek. I was intrigued and visiting his website found his space described as “cozy” and “slightly rustic”, comparable in size to a “two-car garage”. It has a potbellied stove and sleeping loft beneath a pitched roof made from wide planks of chestnut wood. Six low-hung windows usher in an abundance of natural light. I can only imagine the serenity and joy he must find in painting and writing there.

“It's my little room,” he says. “All of my stuff is here and no one can get at me.” He goes on to say, “I try to make it sound smaller than it is. There’s a small space where I work because I want it to be a humble space. Humility is a big part of being open and receptive to everything you see. Part of being a good observer is to know you don’t know anything.”

Like Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s poem, this says so eloquently in just a few words how making a home is so much more than the stuff. It’s the receptacle that contains the sense of yourself, your essence. It describes us and defines us. It informs us and others of who we are. “Artists need a story,” Prosek says. “This space is my story.”

I couldn’t put it better myself. My home/work space is my story too.