Writing is like tending an orchard

So I was hiking the Y tonight, pondering various things, and the thought occurred to me that writing is a lot like an olive orchard.

First, you’ve got the land, both cultivated and wild.  Cultivated land is like your conscious mind, where everything fits neatly into order and you have control over what you create.  The subconscious is the land beyond the fence, where things grow wild.

Ideas are like seeds; they’re everywhere, but only a few ever take root and sprout.  Those that do need to have new sprouts periodically grafted into the old, in order to preserve the entire tree.  These grafts may come from the cultivated ground of your cultivated mind, but more often than not they come from the wildlands of the subconscious.

Each novel is like an individual olive tree.  It takes a lot of time and work to grow one to maturity, but once you do, it can live for a long, long time.  The fruit itself is like the earnings you get by licensing copyright; if you prune the tree carefully (aka do a good job managing your intellectual property), it just keeps on producing.

Of course, in order to make sure your trees grow properly, you need to be constantly enriching the soil of your mind.  That’s where education and life experience comes in.

Since trees sometimes die, you have to maintain several trees at once in order for your orchard to succeed.  And even though it’s a hell of a lot of work, over the long run the returns are enormous.

For the ancients, olives were a major staple crop. In Greek mythology, Athena was chosen as the patron goddess of the city of Athens because her gift of an olive tree was considered more precious than any other.  And just as good books help us expand our minds, better understand and empathize with others, and generally rise above the boredom and mundane-ness of our daily lives, so also the fruit from this metaphorical orchard is truly of great worth.

Anyhow, those were some of my random ponderings, climbing down the mountain.  Someday, I want to have an orchard that covers an entire hillside and produces thousands of pounds of olives!  Just thinking of it makes me hungry.  Mmm, olives…