Why a Novel is Like a Plant

Spring is when all the flowers come and stretch out their roots to grace us with their presence once again, but fall is when authors from all over the world come out of hibernation and start to build. They salute the almost-new-year with a novel, whether produced solely in a month or simply started in that month and worked on more and more as time saunters on.

Think of a book like a plant. First, you plant the seed, and then you put your back into it. You type and you toil and you work until you're within an inch of just giving up: "oh, maybe this seed is defective. Maybe it was doomed from the start not to grow."

But through giving it lots of water, lots of sun and lots of air, the seed expands and changes and mutates into something so beautiful that it's almost impossible to believe such a shining glory could be emitted from such a bland, small seed.

It's a gift of life, from life, representing life.

But a novel is even more amazing than that, for a number of reasons: Reason number one why a novel is more amazing than a plant is because it's as though you actually build the organism from scratch.

It's as if you build a flower, cell by cell. Each plant cell has its components—the letters are your organelles, and the words are cells made up of a varying number of organelles each. Each organelle is essential to a cell in its own way—M's for mitochondria, W's for cell walls, C's for cytoplasm, R's for ribosomes, V's for vacuoles. Without all of the organelles, the cell dies.

You put together each of the organelles into a fully-functioning word. The chloroplasts of the cell will then churn out chlorophyll and the mitochondria will churn out energy, and you will get characters.

The characters are what give your story color and life. They are the colors of your plant, the petals, and what make your story—your flower—like no other flower that has ever grown before. The majority of its DNA may be similar to other stories, but like all organisms, there is that microscopic difference that gives it its own biological fingerprint that is unlike any other biological fingerprint before it.

Once you have your idea, your cells and organelles, and your characters, you stick them into a nice compact seed and bury it in the dirt so that its mission to grow starts. The story stretches out its roots in search of nutrients.

And thus, you put in work.

Reason number two why a novel is more amazing than a plant: Like a plant, you put in work and you wind up with a glorious product. But unlike a flower, a novel needs no physically visible colors or petals with fancy shapes to be a thing of beauty.

The seed contains food for the days before the plant emerges to take in sunlight, in the form of a cotyledon—a concept. But now you must feed your plant with a plot—water, sunlight and air.

The characters metabolize the water and air and plot through the chlorophyll and all those cells buried in that seed coating. A storyline takes shape and holds the plant up as the water that you provide causes the stem to grow stiff and support the leaves—the chapters—and the petals—the characters. Sunlight is converted to the energy in the storyline that keeps the plant alive and growing.

You put work into the story line all summer, keeping the organism from withering or starving, and at times it seems too much. There are plenty of hot days, and plenty of days where you just don't feel like writing. There are days where you come to what seems to be an insurmountable plot obstacle, and you're just stuck and doomed never to get unstuck. But if you press on, and if you water your plant enough and keep it from being fried by the sun, a beautiful result will delight your computer all summer long.

But all good things must come to an end, and eventually the seasons will change. Your plot will wind down, your characters will resolve their problems, and it'll be that time where you have to think of an ending powerful enough to do justice to your story. The chlorophyll will stop producing color, and the leaves will change.

You may choose to have your flower live out its last days in a vase, on display for all your friends and family to see. And you can proudly say "I built that flower from scratch," when your friends ask you whose garden it's from. "It's from my garden. I strung the organelles into cells, and those cells into organs, and those organs into a system of characters and plot. It's my work. It's all mine."

Or your flower may live out its last days in its garden, the epicenter of where it all began—and even though it isn't growing anymore, it still has its deep roots planted in the soil for the earthworms to read.

Eventually, however, the flower will wither and die from the change of seasons. The petals will shrivel up. The stem will lose its stiffness and droop. The leaves will turn brown. The flower will cease to exist for at least another year, if not forever.



Reason number three why a novel is more amazing than a flower:

A novel never dies.