How to Find Writing Inspiration in Your Garden

Creating a garden (or even being in one) is wonderful inspiration for writing. Keeping a garden journal is the perfect way to enjoy both. If you are a gardener, you can use your journal to make notes, develop to-do lists, plan your space, keep planting records and include photos of your garden as it begins to take shape. Keep track of costs and what works and what doesn’t (from year to year) and photos as your flowers transform from spring to summer to fall. Jot down what you might change next year and anything you want to remember for your future garden. As you work with and think about the earth, writing inspiration will come, for stories, essays ideas, poems, maybe even a novel. Let your mind wander free in your garden and you will easily find writing inspiration.

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Gardening is akin to writing stories. No experience could have taught me more about grief or flowers, about achieving survival by going, your fingers in the ground, the limit of physical exhaustion.

–Eudora Welty

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Want to find writing inspiration in your garden?

Why not create a writing space? Is a gazebo or pergola too costly or much work? What about a bench where you can enjoy writing outside and allow your imagination to roam?

Need more inspiration? Try these writing prompts.

Writing Prompts to Find Writing Inspiration in Your Garden

• Write about an experience you had with nature.
  • What happened?
  • Was the experience good or bad?
  • What did you learn?
  • Would you do it again?
• Write about what nature means to you.
  • Why is it important?
  • List your favorite places in nature.
  • What if one were about to be ripped up for a development or mined for its minerals?
    • How would you feel?
    • What would you do?
    • Would you fight to keep it intact?
    • Why?
    • How?
• Write about gardening and why you do it.
  • Does it bring you joy?
    • Why?
  • Does the effort sometimes exhaust you?
    • How does that feel—good or bad?
    • Or both?
    • Why?
• Go into your garden at sunset and stay into dusk and night (take a flashlight or lantern to make notes and be sure you don’t trip on your way back to the house).
  • Write about how the light changes.
  • What do you see?
  • What do you hear?
  • How do the sounds change?
  • Does the air change?
    • How?
  • Now really let your imagination go free.
    • Are there creatures lurking?
    • What kind?
    • Where are they from?
    • Are they supernatural or mythical?
    • Is one a garden gnome or a fairy gazing ball come to life?
    • Where do they go during the day?
    • What do they think of you out here, writing at night?
    • Are they curious?
    • Dangerous?
• Write a free verse poem about your garden.
  • Write a haiku (3 lines, first and last lines have 5 syllables and the middle line has 7).
  • Now write a limerick (3 long lines, 2 short lines rhyming aabba).
  • Make it traditional—bawdy and funny—or not.
  • Next, be like Shakespeare and write a sonnet (14 lines and rhyming).

Need more ideas? How about that garden journal I mentioned in the beginning for some writing inspiration?

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Award-winning novelist Kathy Steffen teaches fiction writing and speaks at writing programs across the country. Additionally, Kathy is also published in short fiction and pens a monthly writing column, Between the Lines. Her books, FIRST THERE IS A RIVER, JASPER MOUNTAIN and THEATER OF ILLUSION are available online and at bookstores everywhere. Check out more at www.kathysteffen.com