I’ve been gardening for about ten years. In the beginning I started with easy plants, varieties that thrive in the Rocky Mountain climate without much effort. But I wanted more. So, I kept adding things. Species that are more difficult to grow, but better fulfill my vision for my garden. Every year there is some color or height of plant my garden seems to need.
But I only have so much space and my garden is getting terribly crowded. Something has to come out before I add anything more. It’s a tough decision. How do you uproot a plant that is lovely and thriving to replace it with something else? It’s seems so harsh.
What will it be? Which plant gets to live and which plant gets weeded out? I consider color. I love purple, but a good share of my garden blooms in that hue: dame’s rocket and columbines, hardy geraniums and delphiniums. With all that purple, the lavender haze of cat mint and sage seem like too much. These are some of the first perennials I planted and they’ve gotten huge, three and four feet wide. I prop them up with low fencing, trying to keep them under control. But something has to give.
I make my decision. It will be the sage. I will dig them out. Not to die, but to pass on to my friend who lives in the prairie/mountain landscape west of town. She has a whole hill to cover with tough, durable species.
Why the sage, and not the cat mint? Well, my cats, non-ironically, like the cat mint, and spend quite a bit of time rolling around on it early in the season. Later, the cat mint will attract bees by the dozen, until the plants come alive with swarming pollinators: honeybees, bumble bees and the occasional swallowtail butterfly.
Writing can be like gardening. (You were wondering when I would finally mention writing, weren’t you?) It’s difficult to pull up and discard a whole subplot. But sometimes the story gets too crowded, and you have to think long and hard about what drives the book. What is its essence? Are there scenes that seem repetitious? They may be tight and functional in and of themselves, but do they make the book better?
I write like I garden, randomly adding things, following a plot-line or story arc to see where it goes. But sometimes it gets too rambling, and I know I have to cut. I have to make my decision the way I do when gardening. What fulfills my vision? What can I do to make my garden/book better? What can I take out and not really miss?
Words, sentences, plotlines. They’re alive, blooming, full of possibilities. So hard to dig them up and discard them. But I have to remember the whole garden. The book. The story. That’s what other people see. What they read.
A bit wrenching, but it has to be done. There. Gone with a click of the mouse.
Already, the story flows better. Seems more cohesive and somehow more real. I’ve done the right thing and dug out those extra words that were getting in the way of the beautiful whole.
Mary – I get this completely. Sometimes I wish I wrote mainstream fiction. I often find a sidetrack developing in one of my stories that I follow and end up writing a perfectly lovely little subplot. Unfortunately in Thrillers there is even less tolerance for subplots that do not feed directly into the main plot. Readers of thrillers prefer their stories tight, and while they love subplots, they had better tie directly back into the main one by the end of the book or they are called a “loose end.” Even red herrings had better have something directly to do with the primary plot-line or reviewers refer to the book as “loose” if they are feeling generous, “sloppy” if they are feeling nasty. Pruning the plot of a thriller is often brutal work.