Cathy and I made a little garden today—lettuce and spinach and radishes. Each spring, when we break the crust and work up the soil, I think of my mother and father and the hours they spent in their own gardens. They had a large one behind our house in town and another one in the country at the farm we still owned. In fact, from time to time, they had three gardens going there. I remember one planted solely in potatoes to keep us supplied through the winter.

The plot Cathy and I work is a raised bed, 4 feet by 12 feet. It’s just enough so we can have a little hobby, but everything we plant reminds me of the hope that comes each spring. Like my parents before us, we set out with optimism. We plant our seeds, and we imagine this will be the year the bean beetles and the cutworms won’t come, and the tomatoes won’t have blossom rot, and the deer will leave everything alone, and the weather will be perfect for growing. We know this won’t be the case, but still, we hope.

So it is with writing. We make marks on a page or a screen, and we don’t think about all the problems that invariably may arise: flat characters, plots that peter out, stilted dialogue, confusing structures, all manner of confusion, until finally the worst thing of all happens. Our stories, which seemed so promising—which thrived as we conceived them—wither and become dead to us. What can we do to bring those dead stories back to life?

1. Pay attention to our main characters. Ask ourselves what we haven’t yet seen about them. Write about aspects that seem contradictory to what they’ve already shown us.

2. Think about setting. Make it richer and full of relevant details. Making a place come to life often resuscitates a story.

3. Rearrange the narrative. Try starting and ending in a different spot. An alteration of structure can make a story resonate.

4. Look at the dialogue. Rewrite a scene with this question in mind—what do my characters want to say to each other but can’t? How can we sharpen the dialogue by making our readers aware of what the characters are saying indirectly? Subtext can make a scene of dialogue pop.

5. Change the perspective. Choose a different point of view character to see what that might bring out of the narrative.

Growing a garden is a journey we take with hope. Along the way, we encounter obstacles, and we find ways around them. The same applies to our writing. We set out with excitement, but that excitement ebbs once we hit a problem. We should give thanks for those problems because each one asks us to find a fix, and before long we have a collection of strategies for improving the stories we want to tell. My father aways told me, when I complained that I couldn’t do something, “Can’t never did nothing.” He didn’t know Samuel Beckett, but I’m sure, if he had, he would have agreed with Beckett’s advice to writers: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”