The View From The Middle.
I just came in from standing in the bed of the garden in front of my house, spade in my hand, wheelbarrow at my knee. The last time I was here, I spent nearly three hours digging, stomping, tugging, and cussing (a little) and managed to extract two juniper bushes and three whole ivy root balls with numerous runners. Ivy root balls are like pet hair stuck in gum, under the sideboard in the back corner, with bits strewn about everywhere you look and impossible to fully clean out. And juniper bushes have tough, wiry roots, not easily cut. I have questioned why I wanted to begin this.
There lies a pile of yard waste about the size of my king-sized bed, along one side of my house. I’m debating if this is a good time to start a compost pile or do I wrestle the lot of it into the bed of my pickup and take it to the local dump. The debate is real because this represents about twenty-five percent of what needs to be removed before the onset of winter.
Along the one side of the front of my house is a tightly packed row of dwarf Japanese barberry bushes. I’ll keep these as they’re healthy and trimmed up cleanly. But there is another juniper bush and a Nandina ‘Firepower’, both of which are half-dead, beside a four-foot-tall Japanese maple nestled up against the front of my house. I’ll need to fell it, if felling a four-foot tree is what it’s called.
On the other side of the front of my house is a bed full of mostly-dead juniper bushes. Three black walnut saplings that somehow have taken root and each stands eight feet or so, cockeyed spears left behind. I think they’re likely the result of active squirrels saving nuts in my garden. They’re too close to the house and must be removed as well.
I have a vision for my garden. But first, the half dead bushes, the randomly planted trees, and the various weeds and rocks need to be cleaned out. If, next spring, I want the clean look of the specific flowering plants my wife desires, the old nasty has to go. And this is that hard, dirty, and utterly unglamorous work of having a nice garden. The part that nobody sees.
It’s the same with my writing. I’m ankle deep in the chaos of building the foundation of the story of my novel. Yes, I’m also writing a novel. And I’m slogging through the part that nobody sees. Yet. People will eventually see, but only when I’ve gotten through this building, cleaning, clearing, and ordering part of the process.
Obviously, I am not a “write by the seat of my pants” kind of writer. I don’t trust not having a plan. It’s how I’m wired and I KNOW without a plan, I would have mounds of anxiety, like stones in my garden and weeds everywhere, mucking up the process and making things ugly. So I plan my writing. Always have. It’s part of how I see things as a strategic thinker. Outlining helps me get my head around the big picture, which helps me understand where the smaller parts and the minute details sit as well.
This process is the ordering of things. In my garden, it’s first clearing out the old, dead stuff so I can see what I’m working with. This will allow me to determine how much topsoil and fertilizer to lay down. And refine the drainage slope. I also plan to install lighting which means having the area clear helps with the planning there too. So I’m in the middle of the details before the details. In my garden and in my story.
My story. It’s awkward to know what to call it at this stage. “My novel” sounds pretentious because I haven’t written anything in my story yet. Right now, it’s a bed of ideas, wild and chaotic. I’m working through Lisa Cron’s Story Genius to build my story. It’s nice to have help in this process.
This struggle to pull order from the chaos is much harder than I expected. It’s taking longer than it used to. I’m not as young and strong in the garden. So I take longer to dig up a plant and need to rest more frequently. And it takes longer to recover and get back to digging. The same goes with building the story frame for my novel. Wrangling the ideas and building a coherent, workable structure is taking longer than it used to. I’m not as young and nimble as I once was in the garden of my mind and the weeds of doubt and ivy runners of fear threaten to choke my efforts before they take root.
But it’s a process. When I cleared the first bushes in my garden, it changed what I see out my front windows. There’s a different frame and clarity. I can see more of my yard and the street beyond. And more light streams into my front room with the foliage and branches cleared away. And the effect is interesting because removing the clutter in my garden has helped remove some of the clutter in my head. Which translates to steady progress at my computer each day.
The garden in front of my house has become a kind of proxy for my story garden. The more progress I make in the one helps me with the other. So, yes, I am in the middle of something. Or more likely, in the first ten percent of the final outcomes. The end is definitely not near. Not even close. But it is possible. Because the first steps are begun.
The view from the middle of it all is a mess. A beautiful mess. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to work.