To Garden or To Architect, That Is the Question

Except it’s a pretty stupid question.

I was recently privileged to attend a lecture by the world-renowned science fiction author Elizabeth Bear. I more or less transcribed the entire meeting, which was a talk about how to write, and specifically how to write introductions. When a person this well regarded speaks, you tend to listen.

One thing she said was, something like, “There is no more harmful assumption than being a garden writer vs. an architectural writer.”

Some things are beautiful for the mix of garden and architecture.

For everyone who doesn’t know the definitions of those two things, it is something like:

Garden writer (also called a pantser, AKA by the seat of your pants you fly...) is a person who has an idea, kind of knows where they want to go, and just sits down and writes. They are considered more likely to have more revisions later because of changes. They are viewed as having no outline beyond what they hold in their head and just go.

An architectural writer has documented outlines, plot arcs, character arcs, and a 10,000-word outline for a 70,000-word novel. The intellectual heavy lifting of the structure is done before they “write a single word,” and they then outline and write scenes with attention to the prose as they go.

Elizabeth Bear said what I have often said, and I felt most justified. “There is no such thing as a garden writer and no such thing as an architectural writer.” Don’t make a dichotomy out of a spectrum.

When I first began writing, I was a garden writer. I had a few scenes in mind which I knew I wanted to happen, and I had an idea of the story. Usually a beginning and end, and some character ideas for in between, and I just sat down and started to write. Those stories are all long since trunked, terrifying pieces of failure.

I have swung so far the other way in my writer’s journey that I have written a 35,000-word outline for a 90,000-word book. I had specific dialogue, blow by blow of every scene massaged into basic shape. The story was there; I just needed to come through with a chisel and sandpaper and get rid of the rough parts. That story was a complete disaster. I couldn’t finish it, and I hated every minute of the experience of trying to write it against that level of outline.

I am neither a full-on garden writer, and I am not a full-on architectural writer. Just like almost everyone else. But how do you know where in the spectrum you lie? The answer is you need to experiment.

If the idea of sitting down to write and just flowing with thoughts and not knowing where the story is going makes the entire experience feel daunting, which it does for me, then don’t do that. Maybe you dip a toe into the shallow end of architectural writing and you tell yourself here are 10–20 ideas I want in my book or novel. Write out one of them. You are trying to tell the story of your life for a biography? Then pick an anchor point. Pick one experience around which the entire thing turns. What is a defining moment?

Maybe there are a dozen, because people are complex. Now you have 12 chapters that you can walk us through, chronologically or perhaps conceptually, to get from where you were to where you are now. You didn’t outline every chapter, you didn’t make note about how you feel that one event plays into your personal character arc, or the novel’s protagonist’s character arc, but you have a touch point. Maybe the touch point is all you need to go off into the wild of the new novel.

You are mostly a garden writer with a touch of architect. Or perhaps you really liked having that structure, and as you write the chapter you wished you had a 100-word series of notes. Maybe bullet-pointed about what it is exactly that you wanted to do with the chapter and you kept missing pieces of it. Then for the next chapter you put your whole foot in the kiddie pool and you give each chapter 100-word outlines for what you want to achieve and how that piece links to all the other pieces.

You can try that for a few chapters. Then you think, I want more structure. And you give yourself 500 words, broken into sections with bullet points, and you sit down to write and you suddenly feel the choking constraint of your own outline sucking all the fun and creativity from the experience. You went too deep and need to step back. Don’t let yourself strangle yourself.

The important part here is you won’t know if you don’t try. You need to experiment with how you write as much as with what you write to find the best version of how you do the writing. As this channel has said many times, there is no one right answer; there are only many answers, and one of them is right for you.

I am far deeper into the architectural writer style than not. While I found my limit, I also find great comfort in the ability to fall back on the structure around me to focus on the pieces of the tale I am doing right now. For people who lean architectural, I have a whole series here and here on how to work your way into architectural writing.

But regardless of how you go about the task, always remember to write regularly. When your book becomes part of your thought process, and you are dwelling on it in your non-writing time, your writing will be so much more invigorated by the thing you believe in. You have a unique story the world needs, and you will find it by thinking about what you have that we all need to learn.

And most of all, the sentence I haven’t said in some time, but remains eternally true: Writers write. So go write something today.