Summer’s in full bloom here in Madison, Wisconsin, and there’s no better time to relish productivity than in the midst of much flourishing. Yes, relish it. Appreciate the plenty. Have you indulged?
The cliché is “stop to smell the flowers.” But have the flowers ever stopped you in your tracks—their fragrance so strong you can’t help but notice? I entreat you to treat yourself while you’re deep in constructive creative work, too.
You’ve probably relished a sentence or line until it’s just the right intoxicating mix of melody and meaning. Or appreciated the tension in a scene you’ve revised so the pages are packed to bursting like the skin of ripened fruit.
Keep relishing.
Galway Kinnell describes the deliciousness of creative burgeoning in his poem Blackberry Eating:
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths and squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
Ah, yes. The splurging. Word to word, sentence to sentence. Plot point to plot point. Are you splurging well?
When we splurge well, we’re appreciating not only the fruits of our labors, but the process behind those labors.
I’m not talking about heady jolts of brainstorming’s lightning, quick thrills of first draft revelations, or boons of insight that come from a benevolent muse’s fickle offerings. I’m talking about your slow nurturing, from seed to stalk, from bud to blossom to fruit, over time. Because you, dear writer, have nourished that work into form.
Don’t shirk the chance to appreciate that burgeoning. Reflect on its harvest, the way you might reflect on the sun that ripened grapes into wine—the presses that pressed, the barrel that held, the people that processed and the seasons and minutes that ticked down until the wine now poured into your glass touches your tongue.
And as you appreciate, don’t be surprised if you chuckle to yourself, recalling a faux pas or series of failures before your work reached its peak ripeness. You probably spent a week slogging through abstract phrasing that fell flat until you gave it dimension through sensory imagery. Or when a reader winced at wooden dialogue during critique, you worked harder until you unearthed the true subtext of the scene. Maybe a secondary character fell into a plot hole, and rescuing her opened up a new direction for your plot. Or perhaps you left her behind, a sacrifice that sealed up a structural gap.
It may have felt cruel. But we know the entreaty to kill our darlings rings true. After all, plants flourish in compost, and so can our creations. To grow and ripen our writing takes not only time and nurturing, but innovation and humility. Our successes only reach their peak because we plow through bad choices—often embarrassingly bad. Which is actually a good thing.
Some days we know this. Others days we’re so enamored with the popular myth of the perfect draft that reworking feels like a slap in the face of creative prowess. But the reality is that good writing— what’s good, plump, and packed to bursting—requires good work. And a little savoring of that good work.
May you splurge well, in this season of ripening.
