Gardening and Web Writing

Barbara Kingsolver, author of the garden and locavore focused Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is a proficient fiction and non-fiction writer. In a recent interview, Kingsolver used a great metaphor to highlight the difference in writing fiction versus writing non-fiction.

The way you make a garden in the desert is you point to a spot and put all your energy into that. You water it and you make something grow. Back east, the way you make a garden is you point to a place–a lush, weedy, brambly spot—and you remove everything else except what you want.

That is exactly the difference between writing fiction and non-fiction.

A novel is like a garden in the desert. You choose the spot and water the heck out of it and work and work and force this plot where there was nothing.

With a non-fiction narrative, we begin with this brambly, weedy thing we call life, and pull out everything that doesn't belong. And it's much harder because you have to pull out so much.

—Barbara Kingsolver, Author

Typically, writing for the web is non-fiction. As Kingsolver points out, non-fiction is hard. The hard part isn't coming up with words, it's pulling out words, sentences, paragraphs, and entire pages.

Whether it's pruning back the fields on a contact form or cutting out paragraphs of product description, letting go of words, as Ginny Redish says, provides a huge service to readers of non-fiction.