What does growing mango and avocado trees from seeds have to do with writing? I read somewhere that an author must tend to his or her garden of stories, those published and those soon to come out. Without too much over-thinking or dropping into sappy cliches, I see some merit in that word picture.

Recently I’ve enjoyed moderate success in sprouting mango and avocado seedlings, and today I was thinking about a couple of ways I could relate that experience to my writing efforts.

Some (most?) fail, some sprout

For my mango project, I planted six seeds. I did them all the same, watered them the same, used the same soil, in similar size pots — you get the point. Only two came up. That amounts to a 33% percent success rate. While most baseball sluggers would kill for a .333 batting average, however, many of us wouldn’t consider that a terribly successful outcome for most of what we try to accomplish.

Yet, I wonder if this sort of outcome more or less mirrors how it goes with writing. How many story ideas and concepts end up connecting in a way that sprouts into a fully formed story, or at least the beginning of one? I like to think I achieve success more than a one third of the time, but I probably don’t. This, of course, doesn’t mean a fledgling “seedling” of a story will take off to become a full-grown tale, which brings us to the next point.

Fruit require a lot of patience and watering

If you Google how to grow an avocado seedling you’ll see you start from a seed in water, and that you will likely have to wait six to eight weeks before you see roots, and most likely another two weeks before you see the top sprout come up. Then you wait for that sprout to grow a few inches before you put it in soil. Then you wait some more.

In my case, this Catalina avocado seed proved more precocious than previous attempts. I thought it was doing very well when I left on vacation, only to find it had gone gang-busters in the span of twelve days. It looks great, doesn’t it? And yet, I will wait years to get any fruit from it. Ditto for those mango seedlings.

A good life lesson for me: the things that count, require time, investment, and care. In this age of instant everything, we’ve gotten used to getting things at the press of a microwave button. Most of life doesn’t click that way.

As I consider the stories I have written and the ones yet on the way, I can apply the principles of my literal garden to that of my literary one. One day it will yield fruit, but it will take time, care and investment.

To see some of my stories, already sprouted and get a glimpse of ones soon to break ground, visit my Amazon author’s page.