Jane Smiley: Make Room for Seeds to Grow

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Award winning novelist Jane Smiley reminds us that not everything we create during a sudden burst of inspiration is worthy of making the final cut.

I think there are two kinds of sentences in a rough draft: seeds and pebbles. If it’s a pebble, it’s just the next sentence and it sits there. But if it’s a seed it grows into something that becomes an important part of the life of the novel. The problem is, you can’t know ahead of time whether a sentence will be a seed or a pebble, or how important a seed it’s going to be.

Because we cannot predict the importance of our work while we create it, it is key to focus on harnessing the creative energy during those bursts of inspiration to move the project forward. Don’t limit where it takes you and be open to new possibilities as they may play a vital role in your finished work. You will have plenty of time in the following drafts to judge the seeds from the pebbles.

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