Architect or Gardener?
Strike the right balance between planning your writing and just going with the flow
I was in a writing seminar the other day, looking at how to write clearly and compellingly for business audiences.
It was a great workshop in most respects, with the instructor emphasising that most writing rules and guidelines are made to be broken. If it makes sense to end a sentence with a preposition, go ahead. Incomplete sentences? Sure! And if you want to start with a conjunction, feel free.
But there was one guideline that seemed less flexible — the one that stated you must always plan what you’re going to write before you pick up a pen or open a document.
This question of which should come first — planning or writing — is one that crops up time and again, and I think we approach it in too black-and-white a way.
Take George R. R. Martin, for example, who thinks most if not all writers are either an architect or a gardener:
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. [. . .] 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.
It’s a neat metaphor and, like most neat metaphors, it leaves a lot unsaid.
To begin with, your approach can change over time.
When I was an English literature undergrad, I was an architect through and through. I would know exactly what would be in my introduction, the three or four main points I would make in the body of my essay, the examples I would use for each point, and how I would link everything together. I would plan my essays down to the word.
I have vivid memories of walking home from class, mulling over my next assignment, stopping regularly to construct complicated diagrams — or blueprints, to follow the architect metaphor — as to which sentence would go where.
You couldn’t fault me for rigour and it made the actual writing process fairly straightforward. At the end of all that planning, I wasn’t writing an essay so much as completing a dot-to-dot picture.
One of the consequences of this approach, though, was its emphasis on style over substance. It would produce fluent, easily readable but not particularly interesting arguments. It’s not that surprising really, considering I spent most of my time thinking about how the ideas would go together rather than what they were in the first place.
These days, I tend to be more of a gardener. I might have a general idea for an article but I won’t plan it out in too much detail before I start writing. Indeed, the writing process is as much a method of thinking as anything else. This is even more pronounced when I write by hand, since the extra time it takes to form the words — along with the necessary breaks to ease cramping fingers— gives you that much more time to think while you write.
If you take the gardener’s approach, you have to accept the results can be a little less predictable than if you’ve done the planning you would expect from an architect. And the process can take a lot longer. Inevitably your thoughts will go off the rails at some point and they can take a while to gather together and redirect into the right path.
Regardless of which approach you go with, it’s important to remember that the architect/gardener dichotomy is a false choice.
Yes, there’s an element of style and personal preference but it also comes down to what you’re trying to achieve with that particular piece of writing, and how much time you have to play with.
Some days, you’ll have a very clear sense of what you need to do, and your words will seem to follow an internal logic of their own. Other days, you’ll have an inkling of a thought but you’ll need to tease it out on paper and experiment with different ways of developing your argument in order to find the one that works.
And then there’s the hybrid approach, where you think you know where you’re heading, before you discover your sentences are leading you off in another, more interesting direction. Rather than being an architect or a gardener, this approach is probably closer to that of a landscape architect — you start with the overall shape of an essay, speech or novel but you allow the individual sections to grow within that basic structure.
More important than the process you follow when you sit down to write is your willingness to adapt. While there’s a lot to be said for routine when it comes to being a successful writer, you also need to be honest about when things aren’t going well, and be willing to try something new.
If you find your plan is stifling your thoughts, you might need to loosen up and just start pouring the words out onto the page, leaving it to the editing stage to prune things back. Equally, if your article is all over the place and your point is impossible to find, it sounds like you need to stop and think about your structure.
Because just like anyone else, writers aren’t black and white, Category X or Category Y. Architects can enjoy gardening, and sometimes gardeners need a plan.
