Monday Motivation - It Starts with a Seed

Welcome to Monday Motivation - It Starts with a Seed

I am sooooo excited to be back here recording a fresh Monday Motivation. I feel as if I've escaped the black hole of moving and it is just so good to be back here with you. This is my happy place.

So, as I was driving through Nebraska, I had this powerful thought that unfolded over the course of a few hundred miles of open road. As some of you know, when you drive through the middle chunk of the country, there are long stretches where all you see are fields of corn. Just, fields of corn. All of you who live in Iowa and Nebraska know what I mean.

Of course, my mind got to thinking about the insane complexities of cultivating that much land with that much corn. Regardless of your beliefs on industrial farming, that scale is impressive. But, as I kept thinking about how wonderful humans can be, I was stopped dead in my thoughts, because no matter how wonderful our progress, to plant those vast fields of corn, we still rely on tiny seeds. Going a step further, even though we have the systems to grow corn across what felt like half the country, we cannot actually create the corn. For that, we need a seed. We need something that is beyond ourselves.

There's a powerful analogy in this thought. I believe stories come to us as seeds. We don't create the stories, in the same way we don't create the seeds for corn. Our job is to sow the seed, to plant it in fertile soil, to tend the tender shoots that spring from the ground, and ultimately harvest the crop. We find these seeds in the emotions of our lives, books we've read, experienced, or been inspired by.

Seeds are really incredible. They are little capsules of life that only need the right conditions to sprout brand new life. Like... take a moment to let that set in. An oak tree which can grow to 100 feet starts as a tiny acorn. Seeds are life contained in a shell, ready to grow and provide shade or fruit, or maybe even a flower.

The seeds of your story are the same. They are often compressed life in a single "flash" moment. Maybe the seed is a character or snippet of dialogue. Regardless, the seed is all you need to get started tell that story.

I still remember seeing a line of rundown tanks cross the Brooklyn Bridge. That was the seed of my current novel. That was all I had when I started almost five years ago.

Whereas a gardener can look down and identify a seed, oftentimes, when we look down at our stories, we don't know what kind of crop they will yield. This places just that much more emphasis on ensuring we plant our stories in fertile soil, we care for them, water them, study what makes them grow strong, ensure we see them to harvest, and then celebrate whatever grows.

One last thought, and this one is punchy. The seeds of your stories already exist. And so you don't get the choice to have seeds or not. You are alive and a human. You have seeds. The question for you is whether you plant them or not. There is a crisis scene in East of Eden when Samuel and Adam are speaking about what they'll pass onto their children. Samuel says, "You're going to pass something down no matter what you do or if you do nothing. Even if you let yourself go fallow, the weeds will grow and the brambles. Something will grow.”

For you, as a writer, remember, even if you do nothing and never plant that seed and tell your story, something will grow... it just might be weeds and brambles.

Thank you so much for listening, and I hope you have a wonderful week of writing.

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