Architect or Gardner?
I’ve recently been going through Brandon Sanderson’s Writing Science Fiction & Fantasy lectures at BYU. If you are interested in writing, I encourage you to check the lectures out. In the introductory lecture, he discusses author’s approaches to how they plan and write their stories.
He describes authors who plan extensively and spend much of their time outlining so when they actually start drafting their prose as Architects. They create their detailed plans and then build those plans.
The other end of the spectrum are authors who have an idea or character or world and start writing while letting their imaginations guide them and develop the story. This type of author is labeled a Gardener; they grow, prune, and tend their ideas until a story emerges.
Of course, Brandon also says that no one is a pure embodiment of each of these. Generic outlines can then have the Gardening aspect applied during the writing, or chapters may have objectives to create an overall outline, but the narrative is grown more organically.
I find these descriptions interesting, since in my non-writing life, I would consider myself an Architect; I plan my work and then work my plan. However, when signing up for NaNoWriMo, I took a little quiz on my approach to writing and was clearly a Gardner (they label it a Discovery writing style). As I look back at my books, I have to agree. A New Past started with an idea and several tropes from an Erotic Science Fiction site. It grew from a do-over story with a twist to almost a million words of prose that took three years to write. Cosimo was the same way. I had an idea and then populated a wold for the characters to explore that idea within. I had no clue where the story was going.
None of this means you have to pick one approach over the other. They simply define the end-points of a spectrum. What works for you is the best approach. However, one other thing that Brandon suggests in his opening lecture is to “try new things”. Hopefully, we will all embrace trying something new as we focus on our writing.
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