Getting Your Hands Dirty
At this time of year, there’s always a bit of garden dirt underneath my nails (and likely in my hair, on my jeans, maybe even on my face). That’s usually because I’m spending a lot of time doing this:
And doing that leaves me looking like this:
But you know me, this article, just like my last post, Late Season Blooms, isn’t really about gardening. It’s about writing. Or, more specifically, about revising. About digging in and getting your hands dirty in your creative life the same way you might in the spring garden.
Almost every writer I’ve ever met can write a beautiful sentence. They can create a metaphor (like getting your hands dirty), craft an image of a radiant sunset behind majestic cedars or the smell of fresh-turned earth on a warm spring day. A smaller number of those writers can not only write a whole manuscript, but revise it to make it something that works not just at the sentence level, but as a whole.
To do that, you’ve go to revise. Shannon Hale describes her writing process this way, “I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.” The building of the castles? That…
