The Author as Gardener: 7 Novel-Writing (and Gardening) Suggestions

Every novel, like every garden, has its own idiosyncratic consciousness. Both endeavors reward the artist’s attention, observation, and occasional neglect. These novel-writing suggestions emerge from my career as an author, and 25 years of gardening in different geographies, from Paris, France to upstate New York, to my current home of Southern California.

There’s a saying that the best fertilizer is the gardener’s shadow. Going outside once a day, senses alert, to observe, you develop an active relationship with your place. In writing as in gardening, there’s no substitute for attention. 

You’ve heard it before, because it’s true: Writing for as little as 20 minutes a day is a reliable method to get a book started and keep it growing. This growth happens both on the page, where you can see it, and in your subterranean self, where the roots of your novel sink into your unconscious. 

Being present with the work of your imagination signals an uncanny force that attracts ideas, suggests harmonies, and proposes solutions, like the happy garden attracts butterflies and bees. To be erratic in your visits too early in either a novel or a garden, you risk your seedlings dying, your vision drifting away.

It’s different, however, when you’ve established something. A completed manuscript, a garden with deeply rooted beds. Whether your draft is kinda good-ish or borderline nonsensical, as long as it’s complete, stop hovering. 

Ignore your book for a while. Let your heart and brain rest, refresh. Later, when you return to the landscape you’ve created, you may be struck by things it was easy to miss when you were focused on details like snappy dialogue. You’ll see big fat mistakes. Storylines in dire need of nurturing. But your heart may skip a beat when it recognizes a few things you did exactly right. 

In the garden, the equivalent is returning after a vacation and thinking woah, this jungle is thriving. So many flowers—so many creatures—so crowded I can barely move! I need fewer plants. Wider paths. And a shady spot with a small fountain where I can sit and work on my book.

Novels and gardens evolve over time. Hours, weeks, years. The author-gardener’s consciousness changes constantly. You experience illness, longing, good fortune. Seasons, phases of the moon. Despondency, elation, political unrest, holidays, crushes, family dysfunction—all the things that make a life. Don’t rush. Your artwork may gain nuance, even wisdom, when you let it unfold without hurrying. 

In the garden, plants communicate with one another through their roots. Relationships form. In the novel’s underground it’s the same. Over time, connections evolve, establishing a web of life that becomes eerily independent of the author-gardener. 

Ideally, the novel starts telling you what to do. How to improve it. And your project develops subtlety and depth as days and years go by, becoming more interesting in every season, in every light.

There were periods in gardening history when it was considered sophisticated to grow plants in places to which they were unsuited. To do this, the gardener creates an environment that mimics the plant’s geographic home, amending with fertilizer, heat, water, pesticide, time, energy, and sometimes a great deal of cash. 

Forcing things to live where they’re uncomfortable is indeed a commitment. Most environmentally aware gardeners today agree that it’s easier on you and better for the planet to grow specimens that are native to your climate, and support the birds, bees, and microorganisms that depend on them.

But gardening, like writing, is a personal, emotional experience, and sometimes, you’re aching to grow a tropical fruit tree in your icy Montana backyard. In writing, an equivalent desire is to write like someone whose work you admire. In either case, no one can stop you from trying. 

For me, it’s challenging enough to write a book that says something meaningful in my own voice, let alone a voice I wear like a mask. Then again, sometimes it’s fun to wear a mask. Fun to grow a fig tree in Alaska. Only you know what’s worth your time and effort. Just try to stay aware of when you’re forcing something. And be conscious of how dispiriting it can be to work against nature.

You’ve completed a draft of the novel you’ve been stewing on for all those years and it’s a magnificent universe with oceans of detail and it’s 1,200 pages long and you’re ecstatic. Then you give it to a trusted reader who says, I’m sorry, but I couldn’t tell what was going on. I couldn’t keep track of all the characters and storylines. I got lost.

Imagine you arrive at a 120-acre botanic garden with thousands of varieties of plants. You’re giddy about the adventure until you realize there are no paths. It’s overwhelming, wading into the tangle with no idea where you’re going, where you are. You might flee. And so might your reader, if you don’t give them a clear path through your world.

In practical terms this means staying aware of when you’re bombarding readers with information they can’t use. When you’re being vague and mysterious just because. In a great garden, there are reveals, reversals, places to stop and enjoy a new perspective or surprising view. 

Imagine someone walking through your book. Every time they turn a page, they take another step down your path. Readers need to trust that you won’t let leave them stranded in the wilderness.

Never be afraid to set aside a cumbersome, unwieldy manuscript and rewrite your book from scratch. Trust the vitality of your initial vision—it’s in your project’s roots, which you’ve been feeding by showing up. Specifically, this can mean moving an early draft crazed with exuberant growth into a folder labeled “Early Drafts,” which I’ll call your compost pile. Rotting organic matter is nourishing, quivering with life, essential to the health of many gardens. What you’ve done so far was not a waste; it was an essential step in growing a robust book.

I labored over my second novel for several years before I archived it, opened a new document, and rewrote the whole thing from memory. That time, unburdened by anything extraneous, the story sang, and sold to Random House at auction. Often in my garden, when I chop dead-looking shrubs to the ground, they return more vibrant than before.

On the flip side, a warning not to throw away early writings before you have a complete manuscript. That’s a different thing—the inability to tolerate your work while it’s ugly. Ugly writing can be perfectly functional as you build your first draft. In the garden, the equivalent mistake would be impatience. Ripping things out by the roots once the bloom has stopped, or the aphids invade. Most living things are surprisingly resilient. Nurture your projects through periods of stress before you give up on them.

Check out Sarah Lariviere's Riot Act here:

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Trust is critical to creating beautiful books and gardens. It’s a cliché, the power of the seed, the acorn that unleashes the oak. But it’s true. Trust your inspiration, that hot sensation you experienced when the vision first appeared—that character, feeling, or fragment of dialogue is the spark that lights the fire that keeps you writing. When you take care of your seed, its world will reveal itself to you, and, eventually, to the many readers who accept your invitation to enjoy it.