Small Council—Gardeners vs Architects: What’s the better way to write fiction?

(Photo by Tiffany Rose/Getty Images)

A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin has often talked about the divide between “architects” and “gardeners,” aka writers who plan their stories ahead of time and those who discover the beats as they go along. He recently expounded on why he’s more of a gardener during an interview at the Jean Cocteau Cinema. Skip to 53:40 below to hear his thoughts.

Today, the Small Council joins the discussion. Which is the better way to write a story? Do we have Martin’s gardening habits to thank for his slow progress on The Winds of Winter? Doesn’t every writer have to be both a gardener and an architect at times? The Small Council is in session.

DAN: In the interest of context, here are Martin’s latest comments on the ongoing architect vs gardener debate, transcribed for your pleasure:

"You can look at The World of Ice and Fire…my book of fake history…and there’s a lot of stuff in there about what led up to Game of Thrones, all the preceding kings and the conflicts of their era and all that, and people have said to me, “You have 50 other novels in here. You could write a novel about Aegon’s conquest, and all that.” And yes, I could, but I don’t think I will because I already wrote those 20 pages about Aegon’s conquest and that’s the important stuff that happened in Aegon’s conquest…I’ve made up the fun stuff, and the twists and the characters and the cool lines of dialogue, you know? I skip over the boring lines of dialogue…The few times I actually quote dialogue it’s great lines of dialogue said by famous historic figures at fraught points. There’s very little of “Hey, what’s for dinner?”"

Martin said the “Hey, what’s for dinner”-type lines are the lines “you have to do when you’re doing a fully fledged novel to make the characters come alive.”

"And of course I love the fully fledged novels, so that’s why I’m mostly a gardener when I write a novel. I know that highlights. I haven’t written them yet, though…and I’m getting from one cool thing to another cool thing."

First of all, we can point out that, outside of highly experimental authors, there’s probably no such thing as a “pure” gardener or architect. Martin discovers things as he goes, sure, but he still “know[s] the highlights.” Likewise, an architect-type may have all the story beats planned out in detail, but he or she isn’t going to plan every individual line before it’s written.

The other thing I’d like to note is that, by the sound of it, Martin couldn’t be anything but a gardener. He outlines it above — he doesn’t want to write the story of Aegon’s conquest because he has all the key moments already set in stone, so where’s the fun writing them down? By the sound of it, for Martin, the process of discovery is his reason for writing fiction, so there’s little point urging him to plan more carefully in the hope that writing will go faster. We get gardener Martin or we don’t get him at all.

That said, yes, I think choosing to develop parts of the story as you go along will inevitably stretch out the writing process. When you come up with a new plot twist, for example, you’ll have to consider how it affects other plotlines, and might even have to go back and change earlier parts to bring them in line with the new development. (That’s something Martin actually does, by the way, to the disbelief of some of his fellow authors.) A gardener’s work, after all, involves planting seeds and waiting patiently for them to sprout. There’s less measurable progress than when constructing a building.

And that can bloom into satisfying fiction. Just look at how some of the seeds Martin planted in the first couple of ASOIAF books — Walder Frey letting the Stark army cross his bridge, Robb marrying a woman not his intended, and Edmure needing to make up for a military blunder — blossomed into the Red Wedding, one of the most audacious fictional massacres of the past couple decades.

Of course, we can’t know which big events were among the highlights Martin knew ahead of time and which he figured out as he went (the Red Wedding wasn’t in his original outline, though). I suspect disentangling one from the other is impossible given the way Martin works. I also think there’s an argument that the most recent two ASOIAF books got too heavily into the weeds — perhaps more architect-like planning could have helped with that.

Do we have any fiction writers out there? How does the gardener vs architect thing work in practice?

RAZOR: I have long been a fan of Martin’s gardener-style writing. In fact, it was this style that drew me to A Song of Ice and Fire in the first place. However, being drawn to authors who are gardeners can feel like a catch-22: Readers came for that style, and then find themselves waiting what seems like quite a long time for a new book because of it.

Gardener authors will explore every possible detail when writing, and can get lost in the details for weeks and sometimes months at a time. There is no better example of this than the wait for A Dance with Dragons, when Martin got infamously stuck on what he termed the “Meereenese Knot,” a term for the sheer amount of characters and timelines that had to be balanced in the city of Meereen.

"All of these things were balls I had thrown up into the air, and they’re all linked and chronologically entwined. The return of Drogon to the city was something I explored as happening at different times. For example, I wrote three different versions of Quentyn’s arrival at Meereen: one where he arrived long before Dany’s marriage, one where he arrived much later, and one where he arrived just the day before the marriage (which is how it ended up being in the novel). And I had to write all three versions to be able to compare and see how these different arrival points affected the stories of the other characters. Including the story of a character who actually hasn’t arrived yet."

An architect author would have structured these events before diving into the deep-end of actual writing. And while there’s certainly nothing wrong with that, it risks smoothing over the detailed descriptions of characters and events Martin is known for.

So in the end, the solution to this question is a bit of a knot in itself, as there really is no wrong or right answer. It all depends on which style you prefer, and how much time you’re willing to wait on each book from your preferred author.

COREY: Not to disagree with Mr. Martin, but I think he’s more of an architect than he gives himself credit for. Martin might get lost putting in the electrical outlets on the 47th floor, but he knows what the skyscraper looks like. Yes, he’s gotten tied up in the Meereenese Knot, but he still had an overall idea of what he wanted to happen. Martin knows point A and point B on the map, but not how to get from one to the other. How else can you explain all the hints, allusions, and clues Martin has dropped as to Jon’s heritage throughout the novels? Or Dany’s visions in the House of the Undying? Those were all allusions to events that had yet to happen. That’s pre-planning. That’s architecture.

I want my authors to have a bit of both architect and gardener in them. Meandering around without ever getting anywhere in a novel is only fun for so long, and we are seeing that happen with Martin’s works now. We can appreciate chapters where Brienne wanders around the Riverlands seeing the effects of the War of the Five Kings on the smallfolk, but eventually we want the novels to get us somewhere. In practice, it’s great to see new characters like Quentyn Martell struggle and fail, but when we’re twenty-plus years into the novels, maybe it’s not the best use of space.

You can tell that Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss are more architects than gardeners. I’ve always assumed the main point of Quentyn Martell’s story in the books was to release the dragons, but if that’s true, there are easier ways to accomplish that — Benioff and Weiss simply cut Quenytn and had the dragons break themselves out. That’s a leaner story, and we lose some details, but it also meant we didn’t have to watch a couple extra episodes where a new character in whom we have no investment travelled across Essos only to die upon reaching his destination.

So I think that, within a vacuum, being a gardener can be a great thing. I love open-ended video games where I can explore every facet of some fictitious world, but I do want there to be a plot I can work my way through. When being a gardener starts to interfere with finishing a story, then it becomes a problem.

KATIE: There’s no “best” way to write a novel — or any piece of fiction — at least not universally speaking. Writing is much too personal a pursuit to generalize, which is why I’m not big on the rules and advice that are usually attributed to the activity. What works for someone else isn’t going to work for you. Architect or gardener, a little of both or neither, whatever gets you to finish the thing is the best way. No matter how you do it, writing a novel takes incredible discipline to research, plot and just to write your project to completion.

I agree with Martin that, in a broad sense, writers tend to fall into either the architect or gardener categories. But sometimes I think those labels can hinder writers if they get too caught up in them. Let’s say I wanted to label my writing style and I discovered that I was a gardener. Chances are I’d then panic and obsessively compare myself to Martin. Am I expanding upon details that he would expand upon himself? Are my descriptions as strong as his? My settings as vivid? I talk about a mountain here — is it as good as that time he talked about a mountain? Am I overdoing it? How many sentences did he spend on that mountain? I should do the same, otherwise it’s an undersell or an overkill. God, my chapters are only half the length of his, so I must be doing something wrong. Is there enough background info here? Martin uses much more background info, so I probably should, too…

See, it would never end.

I used to do that all the time. I’d compare my writing to my favorite authors in such a way that I was never satisfied with what I’d written, because Mary Shelley or Shirley Jackson or Toni Morrison would have written it better. I mean, sure, maybe they really would have written it better. But what’s the point of stressing over it? That’s not helping anybody, least of all me and my book. Authors should inspire you, influence you, but what you create and how you do it shouldn’t be identical to their process, especially if you’re just going to freak out about it like I do.

Martin identifies as a gardener, and I say go on with your bad self, man. I appreciate what you’ve grown here. I’m not much for pruning or blueprints myself, so instead I’ll just set something on fire and see what I can make up with the ashes. Because if I’m honest with myself, my creative process is exactly that: Lighting a few matches and seeing what catches. Oh, and I left the fire extinguisher in the other room and I have no impulse control, sonofa…

RICHARD: I agree with everybody above. Art is so subjective and instinctive — I’d think you would have to write in the way your muse demands. Everybody is probably a mix of architect and gardener, of course, and everybody surely leans a little one way or the other. I’ve heard tell that the architect can be more consistent and the gardener can end up in a mess, but it is the gardener who is more likely, in the long run, to write the masterpiece. But really, you do have to be a little bit of both, unless you’re doing some stream-of-consciousness Jack Kerouac spontaneous prose kinda thing.

But here’s the rub: Has Martin’s gardening-heavy style gotten him into a narrative thicket he’s having difficulty extricating himself from? Is that why every book has taken longer and longer to produce? Martin is thousands of pages deep into his series, and he must be in a place where he can’t remember everything he wrote before, what characters said before, what sword someone handled before, and so on. If he’d built the whole thing primarily as an architect, then perhaps he’d have a logic-driven system for keeping track of the titanic tonnage of details he’s built into his fantasy world. But if he’s haphazardly constructed a beautiful but wild Hanging Gardens of Babylon, then he may have screwed himself, in terms of the time it takes double-checking details, because now he has to dig and tunnel around looking for stuff which was planted without a specific plan. And so it takes longer and longer for him to polish up his work because he spends most of his time searching to see and match up with what he did before.

But perhaps it is the grand, mad, untidy  sprawl of imagination that allowed Martin to generate the master work we all love so dearly. In that case, no matter how much we grumble, we should be thankful for the wait.

SARAH: Whenever I’m in the mood for a light, easy read, I reach for a crime novel. As a reader, I enjoy structure and coherency in the stories I devour. I read a crime novel recently — I’m not going to name it here — that was so bad, it made me a little angry. I found a lot of threads that resulted in nothing and characters with seemingly no motivation behind their odd behavior. There was no direction at all, and the result was a hot mess. Once I finished it, I read the author’s blog and discovered that he had no idea who his killer was until the last chapter. He made that decision, arguably one of the most important decisions a crime writer can make, at the last minute. That just about sums up my issue with writers who are too free and easy with their gardening.

You see examples of it in television, too. Take ABC’s Once Upon a Time, a show that started out with promise, but gradually devolved into a contradictory mess because the writers get carried away, adding too many new characters and breaking pre-established rules whenever it suits them. Most people will come up with new ideas during the writing process, but sometimes it’s good to discard a couple of them.

George R.R. Martin has employed both styles to write his novels, but I agree with own assessment of himself. His inclination is to garden, and ASOIAF has spiraled outwards — from a planned trilogy to a seven-part series that isn’t close to finished — because of that. This isn’t a complaint, because the delay on Winds has never bothered me, but it does indicate that the gardening approach, when liberally applied, can lead to problems.

This is not to say that I think the gardening method is bad in itself. Like Katie, I write fiction. I believe that when you invent a character, you have a responsibility to let them grow, which sometimes means letting them branch out in unusual directions. This is when the gardening style comes in handy. Applying a predominantly ‘architectural’ style can also backfire. If you plan something out to the last dot and refuse to budge, you’re likely to write yourself into a corner or stifle the natural progression of your own characters.

There are pitfalls and benefits to both styles. I simply don’t believe that any good writer can be one but not the other. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that the terms ‘gardener’ and ‘architect’ are restrictive in themselves. Why can’t a writer be a healthy mixture of both? A lack of planning can lead to an unreliable, pockmarked plot, while too much planning can lead to the Stannis Baratheon of stories, stiff and unyielding. When it comes to it, my point is that it’s possible to establish a balance between being a gardener and an architect, because writers (by their nature) are neither. Writers are artists, and art should never be restricted to one particular style.