HOW TO GROW A STORY, PART TWO

by Miko Johnston

Those of us who cultivate a vegetable garden should be enjoying the bounty of our spring and summer labor, perhaps getting ready to plant heartier vegetables for the fall. I thought I’d covered all the parallels between gardening and writing last year around this time, when I posted HOW TO GROW A STORY, but I’ve found more.  The comparisons continue in PART TWO:

Choosing what to plant

Your local farmers market sells produce that thrives in your growing zone and the majority of shoppers want to buy. That means you must decide what’s worth planting yourself and what you’d rather purchase. I grow less popular crops as well as those best eaten when they’re fresh picked.

A writer must decide whether working in the more popular genres and following current fads, which might be more profitable, should outweigh the desire to write stories we want to tell, even if sales won’t be as strong.

Support your plants

Some plants need structure, literally – cages for tomatoes or trellises for climbing vines. In writing, the plot or premise provides structure on which to build your story. Aside from physical structure, plants also need healthy soil amended with composted material and fertilizer, ample sunlight and water to grow and thrive.

Writers can fertilize ideas with the works of other writers. Reading books that successfully carry a story through from Once upon a time to The end, as well as books about the craft of writing, provide inspiration and insight on how to make it happen in our own stories. Listening to well-told stories teaches us how to make our written words more visual and captivating. A critical eye, like sunshine, allows us to see what’s best kept in and what’s best weeded out.  We can sidestep preventable errors with technical books like the dictionary, thesaurus, and the Chicago Manual of Style (for fiction). Also, a good fiction writer knows sometimes adding a little – ahem – manure helps.

Protect your plants

From seed to harvest, many pests out there can ruin a crop. Netting prevents birds from eating the seeds or destroying sprouts. Good fencing keeps predators like rabbits, deer and snails out of the beds (sometimes). Weeds must be pulled, plants sprayed or constantly inspected for signs of disease and insects.

Likewise, cliches, repetitive or pointless scenes that divert from the plot, formulaic characters, and excess verbiage can ruin a good story. Rigorously weeding out these elements in our revised draft will strengthen our work.

When in doubt, ask an expert

I’ve learned a lot about gardening through trial and error: Harvest vegetable seeds only from organic plants. Rely on starts for slow growers like basil and tomatoes. Never grow more than one zucchini plant, and monitor it daily unless you want baseball bats and truncheons (same for cucumbers). Many of the lessons I’ve learned about writing came from trial and error as well. But if you’re having a problem in the garden that you can’t solve, go to a nursery, arborist or a master gardener for help. That’s how I discovered why my watermelon radishes didn’t grow – I planted them at the wrong time.

The same goes for your writing. I’ve gotten marvelous advice from my fellow writers, as well as other sources you might not have considered, like a local bookstore owner, history professors who specialize in the era I write about, my doctor, police officers, and librarians. Conversations with family and friends about loved ones in our past have reminded me of personal traits or events that have worked their way into my stories and books. And my grandson helped me murder someone and get away with it – okay, that came out wrong. He’s majoring in forensic science and helped me kill off a character in my novel.

Many readers know a great deal about a great deal, so even in fiction, one false step in a story will put them off. I helped one author correct some technical flaws in his globe-trotting novel because I’d been to the places he’d written about. A sci-fi writer checked a plot point with my husband, a physicist who understands what would really happen to humans outside Earth’s atmosphere. He explained an astronaut would freeze, not burn up, in outer space. Use whatever resources you can to make your story as viable and believable as you can.

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Even if you don’t have a garden, you can rely on these tips to plant the seed of an idea, then support and nurture it into a fully-fledged story that satisfies the reader’s appetite as much as the bounty of summer.

Miko Johnston, a founding member of The Writers in Residence, is the author of the historical fiction series, “A Petal in the Wind”. Her fifth and final book in the series is about to be published. She’s also a contributor to several anthologies, including the bestselling “Whidbey Island: An Insider’s Guide”. Miko lives in Washington (the big one) with her rocket scientist husband. Contact her at mikojohnstonauthor@gmail.com