On Starting Small: Margaret Atwood and the Single Seed

"A word after a word after a word is power."

Margaret Atwood, novelist and poet, wrote that line in a 1981 piece about the creative process. She had already published The Edible Woman and Surfacing, but critics still dismissed her as a regional writer. The quote appeared in a moment when she needed to remind herself why she persisted. She wasn't making grand claims about changing the world. She described the basic unit of her craft: one word, then another, then another.

Atwood gardens. She has written about composting, about the patience required to coax stubborn perennials through Canadian winters, about watching seeds germinate. In interviews, she compares writing novels to tending plants. You prepare the soil. You plant. You water. You wait. Some days you see no progress. The work happens underground, invisible, while you show up and do the small tasks.

This week, people across the northern hemisphere are starting seeds indoors. They fill trays with soil, press tiny seeds into cells, label rows with popsicle sticks. Each seed represents faith in accumulation. The tomato seedling on your windowsill in March becomes the plant that produces thirty pounds of fruit by August. The basil you start from seed costs pennies and yields scissors-full of leaves all summer.

Atwood's insight works because it scales. Learning Italian means memorizing one verb conjugation, then another, then another. Training for a 5K means running one mile, then adding a quarter-mile, then another quarter-mile. Building a bench means cutting one board, sanding it, fitting it to the next piece. People abandon goals not because the end seems impossible, but because they forget that large outcomes emerge from small, repeated actions.

She wrote that line forty-three years ago. Since then, she has published seventeen more novels, six poetry collections, and numerous essay collections. She won the Booker Prize twice. The Handmaid's Tale became a television series that introduced her work to millions of new readers. All of that started with single words, placed one after another, on days when she had no guarantee anyone would read them.

Plant the seed. Write the sentence. Run the mile. The work compounds.

Related:

"The secret of getting ahead is getting started." — Mark Twain, author

"Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world." — Howard Zinn, historian