Creative Gardening: Cultivating Your Writing

Garden Tools for the Writer’s Workshop

Last week’s article was flat and almost soulless. Why? Well, it was meant to illustrate how the creative muse, flow, or however you want to call it, progresses. I thought I’d be clever and try something different. What a disaster. Such is life; I’m allowed to have a bad day.

I think I illustrated effectively how the thought processes leap from pillar to post, starting from the seed of an idea. But the finished article seriously needed a good edit. It didn’t flow at all and was so disjointed that even my AI agent said so. I ignored it, as usual, more the pity.

There is a silver lining, though. It spurred me to write this article, following up on the creative part of a creative writer’s ‘thing’ and getting down to the nitty-gritty of producing a finished product. After all, you wouldn’t expect even the most celebrated author to be able to sit down and pump out yet another masterpiece without having to write a second, third, or more draft. It’s a process like any other.

My AI assistant suggests outlines, topics, or subtleties I hadn’t considered. The actual writing is all human me. The assistant also advises me when I’m being boring if I choose to listen

Creative Gardening: Source DALL-E 3

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Cultivating Your Writing Process

An analogy that comes to mind stems from my other major project this past weekend: trying to wrestle the backyard into some semblance of order after a long and very wet winter.

A gardener wouldn’t just spend a fortune at the garden center, dump everything in the yard, and expect it to self-organize, now would they?

The same goes for creative writing, long or short-form, or anything in between.

Over the last month or two, I’ve been harping on about process—process this, process that, and so on and on and on. All that was thrown out of the window for last week’s article. This time, however, I’m practicing what I preach.