Tend To Your Lily Pads
A metaphor for life and writing.
When I was in college, my friend told me this: “You can only have six lily pads. And you can only take care of one at a time.” I have never been able to find this metaphor again, and so I can only assume it was a mashed-up version of some other metaphors she got mixed up, but somehow, this made-up piece of advice has stuck with me.
I often feel this way with my work (and my life.) I find that I hop from lily pad to lily pad and grow them a little bit at a time. Yeah, we’re going to make this metaphor work. A lily pad might be “family” or “home” or it might be “self” or “ career.” You hop between to take care of each aspect, to make sure all of your lily pads are doing okay.
But I also think of this idea in smaller units as well. In my writing career, I think of my lily pads as aspects of my career that I grow, in little spurts every once in a while. I can think of a few lily pads that I jump between:
Writing. I mean, obviously. For me, this also includes community and marketing efforts, they’re all sort of wrapped up together for me. I write books, I post about them, I meet up with my writing friends, I do events. This is what I spend the bulk of my time doing.
A recent kidlit gathering: Vicky Fang, Stephanie Lucianovic, Christine Evans, Kristi Wright, Seina Wedlick, Cathy Tran My website. This one feels like a separate lily pad to me. Not so much the little content updates I’ll do, like adding a book title, but the bigger overhauls. Every once in a while, I’ll hop over to my website and improve it. Maybe I’ll update my author visit information (this is what I most recently did.) Or maybe I’ll add a fancy drop-down menu. (Admire my drop-down menu!) I only tend to it once in a while, but it gets better bit by bit.
vickyfang.com My school visit presentations. This is another separate lily pad for me. Much like my books, I’ll get some burst of inspiration. Or I’ll have a new book come out. Or, most recently, I booked a session with Kathy Halsey to help me think about my school visit content and how to shape them. Again, I revisit this lilypad every once in a while (usually with a new book release), and it grows and improves slowly over time.
My Substacks. Because I write my Substacks pretty consistently, it doesn’t feel as much like a separate lily pad, but I recognize that it is separate from my other efforts. I jump to tend to it every week or two, and it is growing, bit by bit. I know in the beginning, it feels pointless to start a newsletter. But slowly, it grows.
The point is, I feel like I hop from lily pad to lily pad and slowly work on each aspect of my writing career. And they do grow! So if I pause and look, my lily pads have grown so much over the years. (And then I might notice one lily pad is falling behind and I go take care of it. Or I’ll have a break from my main lily pads and hop over to one I’ve been ignoring for a while.) Bit by bit, bird by bird.
And then, of course, I sometimes have lily pads in my personal life that I need to tend to. My kids, my house, my marriage, myself. And that’s okay. It’s actually one of the things that I appreciate about this career—that I can hop over to my personal life and take care of it when I need to.
All this to say, your efforts may feel small but if you just keep going, hopping from lily pad to lily pad, they will grow. The things you’ve chosen to put those consistent spurts of effort into will flourish, incrementally over time. So you don’t have to worry about having the biggest and best lily pads from the start. Just keep hopping.
Thanks to my friend for her mixed-up made-up metaphor all those years ago.
***Editing to add: My friend tells me she heard this metaphor from a friend who told her she heard it in Australia. So maybe it’s not mashed up after all? Any Australians ever heard of this one?? 🧐
Now I feel like I need to have a little frog friend on my desk to remind me to keep hopping and growing.
I haven't heard the lily pad one, but I have heard of the Four Burners Theory, which is very similar, and I heard in Australia, so maybe that's related to what your friend heard. Basically, the idea is that we all have four burners: family, work, friends/social life, and health, and that we can only properly attend to three of the four at any one time. But I like the idea of lily pads, and it's true on my to-do list, I always break out family stuff (people related), work stuff, and house/adulting stuff as my three lily pads, mostly because the family one is a very loaded lily pad at the moment. But that won't always be the case, and hopefully I can hop over to a health-and-fun-focused lily pad more often, too, in the future.