The Architect and the Gardener
Which One Are You?
“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. . . . The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it.” —George RR Martin
One day I’m going to make a Buzzfeed-style quiz writers can fill out to find the exact percentage of planner versus pantser they are—or in this case, architect versus gardener—because no one is all planner or all pantser. Good morning, I guess that’s what today’s Shelf Life is about. Maybe next Shelf Life will be about how to make an online quiz in case anyone needs to know that. It’s a thing I know how to do but I’m not actually going to do, because the days are short and I’m tired.
First of all, we are wishing a very happy birthday to Shelf Life reader my mom. We made sure she got an actual cake that was in no way pumpkin themed or flavored.
Today’s Shelf Life is a planning-versus-pantsing redux because I saw this quote from George RR Martin and then spent some time thinking about it. The full quotation is significantly longer then the truncated version above but I feel like I captured all the important parts. GRRM is profligate with words. There was no reason for A Feast for Crows to be as long as it was. I could have written A Feast for Crows in ten words or fewer:
Needless to say, it didn’t work and everyone died.
But anyway, the essence of the quote is at the top of this article so you don’t need to link out to read the whole thing.
The idea is that an architect is a writer who plans everything out ahead of time, while a gardener is a writer who drops a seed in the ground and then allows it to grow the way it will. I had to stop and ask myself, first: Is this meaningfully different than the “planners and pantsers” dichotomy that I’m used to seeing, or did GRRM just repackage this ubiquitous idea and present it as his own?
A planner is a writer who plans—yeah I already said that part. It’s the same as architect. A “pantser,” for those who are just tuning in now, is a writer who “flies by the seat of their pants.” I dislike this term because it implies recklessness or carelessness, which I don’t think it is meant to. Perhaps pantsers might be better characterized as goers-with-the-flow—those who begin with an idea and then go where the story takes them. As GRRM would say, gardeners.
To my mind, planning and pantsing are two equally good ways of writing down a story. I’ve known writers who lean too far in one direction or the other, to the detriment of their projects—for instance, people who can never seem to finish their planning and start the draft, because there are always more details to plan, versus people who don’t plan at all and leave behind a string of unfinished 10- and 20-page manuscripts because they begin without knowing whether their idea has the substance to grow into a full story.
A nice thing about the planner/pantser version is that there’s a middle road: The plantser. This is someone who takes a bit from the planner’s comprehensive instruction manual and a bit from the pantser’s hastily scrawled sticky note and combines methods into their own personal admixture of planning certain parts of the manuscript in advance and letting other parts come to them as they write.
Personally, I think most writers would qualify as planters if it came down to it—it’s just that people tend to identify more with planning or more with pantsing. GRRM says: “I'm much more a gardener than an architect.” This helpfully implies that one might be a combination of architect and gardener—you don’t have to be one or the other.
I want to talk a bit about architecting and gardening and how those things compare to story writing.
An architect doesn’t plan things out because she is fastidious or persnickety about things. I mean, she may be. That may be part of her personality or what lead her to become an architect in the first place, what drew her to the profession. But that’s not the reason architects plan everything out in meticulous detail. They plan everything out in meticulous detail because if they do not then their building may fall down and kill the people inside. This is why architects need to be licensed to practice their craft, and their licensing usually requires a mix of education (a specific degree), experience, and passing an exam—much like a doctor. People’s lives depend upon their work being sound. Logistically, tremendous amounts of money depend upon the architect’s planning work being complete before work starts on the building they have designed.
This is not at all like telling a story. I’ve yet to hear that anyone has lost their life to an ill-planned story. A manuscript can always be revised and edited to shore up any weak points that are discovered after the structure has been erected. An architect—a good one, anyway—is actually a wondrously creative person. They visualize a space in great detail and bring it to life.
A gardener, on the other hand, does not merely walk walk along dropping seeds into the ground and hoping they take root. Not a professional gardener, anyway, someone who does it for their living. Which I assume is what GRRM is talking about, since he contrasts gardeners to architects. So a professional gardener: Someone who creates gardens or landscaping for a living. Believe it or not, this requires a lot of . . . planning. This requires a lot of advance thought about the area that will be filled in with plants—what type of soil it has, how much rain it gets, how much sun exposure. They don’t simply reach into a pocketful of seeds and scatter those around. A lot of planning goes into which plants cohabit well with which other ones; and which grow tall and which grow short; and what colors their blooms will be and will those coordinate. This requires amazing creativity and the ability to . . . visualize a space in great detail and bring it to life.
What would be the middle road between an architect and a gardener? After some thought I think it must be a civil engineer. They imagine, design, and supervise the creation of infrastructure projects like buildings, roads, parks, public facilities, traffic lights, and so on—but also, they play a lot of golf. Sorry, the golf is not actually relevant. Civil engineers are known in the engineering world for playing golf, though. I had to get this dig in.
What I mean is, a civil engineer is like the middle of the road between an architect and a gardener because after all their careful planning and design, the human beings who inhabit and use the resulting infrastructure will do whatever the they want regardless of what the civil engineer originally had in mind. Oh you went to all the trouble to put a stop sign at this corner? One out of every four cars runs it. You put a jogging track around the airport? Well guess what, nobody uses it. Everybody runs around the lake instead. You know that new shopping center with Starbucks? You did a bad job on the parking lot so everybody parks at the church next store and walks over to the Starbucks and now God is mad at you.
Stories are like that. Sometimes they do what you want however much you plan.
But anyway, when I see someone ask, “Are you the architect or your story? Or more like a gardener?” I’m thinking: In this context those are they same thing—those are both a creative professional who does a tremendous amount of advance planning to bring their vision to life.
Here are some professions that, to my thinking, are more like the “pantser,” who flies by the seat of their pants, than the gardener:
A server in a restaurant. You know who’s seated at your tables and you know what’s on the menu but everything else is out of your control. Is it someone’s birthday dinner? Is the couple at table six getting engaged? Does anyone have a serious food allergy? You don’t know. You will have to wait and find out as your shift unfolds.
A therapist. The characters are your patients. They tell you all the details of their sordid stories. You write furiously while they talk. You see them diving headlong into situations that will bring about abject disaster. You are powerless to stop them. You can only watch, chronicle, and help them reflect after the fact.
A human resources manager. You know everybody’s name and you know the rules everyone is supposed to follow but, let’s be honest, you’re here because everyone breaks all the rules all the time. You cannot make anyone follow the rules. You might be able to mitigate the fallout of their actions. Maybe.
The product owner in an Agile environment. You select the tasks your team must get done during this sprint. The team will get half of those things done, they will completely fail to do the other half, and then somehow they will come up with a third half of tasks all on their own and get those done instead of the things you told them to work on.
A middle-school janitor. The building was clean when you clocked in this morning and the building will be clean when you clock out tonight. Between those two events: Chaos. You have a bucket and a mop. Good luck.
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