How Does Your Garden Grow?

Order and chaos have been on my mind lately.

What, you too?

See, I've been thinking about writing methods, because last week on Word Whores was all about pre-plotting versus misting through a novel and this week is about writing rituals, or lack thereof.

What I'm discovering is that these things have a whole lot to do with how we set up the rest of our lives. This should be no surprise to me. I'm a fan of tesseract theory and how a small piece of one thing reflects the overall thing. I've talked before about how the structure of one day can be the pattern of your entire life. (This is an over-time concept, so don't panic if you just had a nothing day.) So it makes sense that your overall life affects the pattern of a single day.

We all plan our lives differently. We have different amounts of pre-plotting or misting to our days. Some of us have structure thrust upon us in the form of jobs that require us to be behind our desks from x o'clock to y-thirty. Some jobs change daily and, though you might apply a tentative structure in the form of To-Do lists, this can change completely depending on phone calls and what hits the In-Box. I expect we find our way to jobs that suit us this way. I love my day job for an environmental consulting firm because all that matters is the quality of my work and that I meet deadlines. No one particularly cares what the clock says when my butt is in the chair, just so long as I get the work done and get it done well.

This suits me. I had one of those "be there from x o'clock to y-thirty" jobs before and hated it.

A friend of mine once told me she'd read a psych study that showed that people with very orderly internal lives have wild and disorderly gardens. Likewise, people with more chaotic internal lives tend to produce orderly gardens. She said this while looking at my untamed cottage garden. The photo above shows my usual gardening style, though we'd only been in that house a few years and I hadn't had time to completely convert it to a jungle-tangle. If I were to show you a picture of my friend's garden, you would see her neatly bordered rows, with bunches of plants set an exact distance apart. Very pleasing to the eye.

I was forever wanting to sneak over and plant a stray something in the wrong spot.

At any rate, I've discovered that, though I'm an orderly person in many ways: ritualistic about my days, methodical in scientific work and my love for spreadsheets is near legendary, there's another side of me that loves to fling order to the winds and embrace chaos.

I may never plot simply because I love the wildness of an unplanned novel. Oh yeah, later I'll go back and thin it out here and there, tweak the plantings for maximum effect.

But first I'm tossing my seeds into the wind. Just to see what I get.