At some convention in the distant past on some panel about something or other, someone once asked me whether I was an architect or a gardener. I had really no idea what they were talking about but replied that, as a physicist and an engineer, I was probably more of an architect with everything laid out just so. As best I can tell, the question goes back to something George RR Martin once said (lifted off Goodreads):
“I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they’re going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there’s going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don’t know how many branches it’s going to have, they find out as it grows. And I’m much more a gardener than an architect.”
I dare say the notion of such a distinction existed before, but let’s let George take the credit. Someone else asked the same question and got a similar but slightly different answer.
“I’ve always said there are – to oversimplify it – two kinds of writers. There are architects and gardeners. The architects do blueprints before they drive the first nail, they design the entire house, where the pipes are running, and how many rooms there are going to be, how high the roof will be. But the gardeners just dig a hole and plant the seed and see what comes up. I think all writers are partly architects and partly gardeners, but they tend to one side or another, and I am definitely more of a gardener. In my Hollywood years when everyone does work on outlines, I had to put on my architect’s clothes and pretend to be an architect. But my natural inclinations, the way I work, is to give my characters the head and to follow them.
That being said, I do know where I’m going. I do have the broad outlines of the story worked out in my head, but that’s not to say I know all the small details and every twist and turn in the road that will get me there.”
It’s less black and white when put that way. I’ve met writers who claim they have no idea where their stories are going when they start to write and I just can’t get my head around that. On the other hand, I’ve yet to find an out and out architect, and while I can understand how that works in principle, I can’t get my head around how that works in practice either. During last year’s NaNoWriMo, though, I found myself working on a historical mystery story and found myself working in a very different way, and that led me to wonder how much the nature of the story itself influences the way it needs to be attacked.
Consider the Game of Thrones type of narrative. Events are seen through the eyes of multiple characters and there is no one character who carries the narrative and owns the story. The world is your oyster. You can, as the author, choose to look at any part of your world through any pair of eyes and observe any event. It’s impractical to design the blueprints for an entire world and everything that’s happening. Some scenes are chosen because they reveal the developing plots but others are chosen to reveal character or for atmosphere or simply because. Once a few characters have been established and begin to do things and to interact, there’s a desire to follow up on the consequences of those actions and interactions. There’s no reason not to go with a moment of inspiration and see those consequences through the eyes of some previously unimagined character; and then it’s nice to let your secondary characters develop a little rather than show up, act out their strict narrative purpose and then leave like good little cardboard cut-outs.
This is a natural story narrative for a gardener as it has very little structure. Seeds grow and bloom and drop more seeds, some entirely unexpected, and the author prunes and trims or not, with more or less of an eye on the direction of the original plot which is perfectly at liberty to fall by the wayside when a more interesting plot starts to develop all on its own. I suspect it’s extremely difficult to architect a story like A Game of Thrones because there are so many unknowns and so many possibilities that in order to write an outline you’d almost have to write a full first draft story
[As an aside, here’s a thought: is ensemble fantasy with no clear central character a relatively new thing (although Lord of the Rings arguably splits the lead between Frodo and Aragorn)? Does the rise of this type of story owe anything to table-top roleplaying games, the goal of most of which is to tell a story using an ensemble cast of roughly equal status? Has Dungeons and Dragons trained a good swathe of modern fantasy authors towards a certain kind of storytelling?
“My natural inclination … is to give my characters the head and to follow them … I do have the broad outlines of the story worked out in my head, but that’s not to say I know all the small details and every twist and turn in the road that will get me there.” Sounds to me like a fairly precise description of the best table-top RPGs. I’ve played with out-and-out gardeners who left our characters to get on with it and as a result very little happened and I’ve seen plenty of architects go mental with frustration trying to railroad a gaming party along a particular line of plot. The best all ran with a plot that was well-defined in its most general sense but whose details were defined on the fly either by or in response to the actions of the participating characters.]
Now consider an older school of more mythic fantasy but still with an ensemble cast (Magician, Belgariad, Star Wars, I’m looking at you now). The difference here is that one character is special, the one taking the mythic journey, and the others, however well developed, are supporting cast. There is a little more architecture involved but not much – the stories are simple with only a few key turning points. The main difference is that the gardening side of the narrative will likely require more ruthless pruning. It’s more like formal landscape gardening where a particular overall design must still remain. Still more suited to a gardener than an architect though.
Then you have the old-school sword and sorcery style of narrative, the action driven adventure story heavily revolving around a single hero or heroine – Conan, a lot of Gemmell (although not Legend) and such like, but also Bond, Indiana Jones and most other action heroes. Again, simple plots, which probably suits the gardener but also with fewer characters and interactions to suit the architect (I say this purely from first-hand experience that it’s always how characters relate to other characters which breaks my early outlines). Maybe this type of story goes either way.
Police procedurals, thrillers, mysteries, any narratives that rely on investigative tension and suspense are, I suggest, where the architects come into their own. Here the plot is necessarily a carefully choreographed sequence of many steps and revelations which must occur in a particular order. Information has to come to the central character in order to provoke an action that results in revelation that results in more information and so on; even if there are several separate mysteries to be unravelled and numerous red herrings on the way, a good mystery requires a palpable and continuous sense of progress while at the same time the tension of not knowing what’s waiting at the end. This demands a careful attention to both pacing and the sequence of events and doesn’t tolerate much noodling about by the main character and certainly not by the secondary characters; although again there are counter-examples.
It leaves me wondering whether the balance of gardening vs. architecture is defined more by the writer or more by the story, whether “gardening and architecture” is another way of saying “character and plot,” and whether, since fantasy seems generally to eschew this type of narrative (with some wonderful exceptions) while SF and Horror seem much more at home with it, why is fantasy mostly for gardeners?
This article was originally posted on March 6, 2014.
