Flowers in the Floorplans

Everyone’s a gardener

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According to George R. R. Martin, writers come in one of two varieties:

There is the architect, which is one type. The architect, as if designing a building, lays out the entire novel at a time. He knows how many rooms there will be or what a roof will be made of or how high it will be, or where the plumbing will run and where the electrical outlets will be in its room. All that before he drives the first nail. Everything is there in the blueprint.

And then there's the gardener who digs the hole in the ground, puts in the seed and waters it with his blood and sees what comes up. The gardener knows certain things. He's not completely ignorant. He knows whether he planted an oak tree, or corn, or a cauliflower. He has some idea of the shape but a lot of it depends on the wind and the weather and how much blood he gives it and so forth.

Let’s go a step further and assume this architect vs. gardener distinction describes not only two types of writers but also two types of people or two orientations toward doing/making stuff.¹

First, we should acknowledge an obvious caveat—one which Martin freely admits: No one is pure architect or pure gardener. However, most of us tend toward one or the other, and it’s not hard to find examples of each among working artists. Martin himself, for instance, claims to be a gardener. George Saunders, Marilynne Robinson, and Haruki Murakami all report working by a similar method.²

“Pure gardening”—or at least something close to it—has coherence as a creative approach and life philosophy. Iterating on an initial seed of an idea is as good a strategy as any, and there are many examples of people with remarkable accomplishments who came to their success without anything resembling a master plan. As Ann Lamott describes:

E.L. Doctorow said once said that “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard.³

But for would-be architects, a subtle problem creeps in: No blueprint is detailed enough to predict the work in its entirety. Many plans turn out to simply be untenable due to flawed predictions or external disruptions. And even when plans are broadly accurate, the only model which can perfectly capture reality is, technically speaking, an exact duplicate of the finished product it describes.⁴

In other words, however sure you are of the beats or overall structure of a piece of writing, there will nevertheless be discoveries on the word and sentence level. Similarly, a life plan offers only a pale shadow of the true richness of experience—even if it is “fully realized.” (Sure, you may have correctly anticipated that you would marry at thirty, move out to the suburbs, and have two children. But did you predict that your husband would be a Laotian-Lithuanian pharmacist; that your house would turn out to have a termite infestation; or that your kids would develop, respectively, into a talented oboist and an aspiring journalist with an encyclopedic knowledge of the WWE?)

To be sure, there is still value in planning. My claim is simply that recognizing the limits of our foresight can help us to accept and relish the inevitable surprises that arise. These surprises are the “flowers in the floorplans”: the unforeseen joys, jolts, and subtleties which, for better or worse, give stories their true meaning. After all, to read just the summary of a great novel is to miss almost entirely why it is beloved. The bio or obituary of a great person is equally lacking in detail—as is any forward-looking vision of your own art, career, or life journey.

In this sense, “architect vs. gardener” is a useful but somewhat misleading distinction. If we humans do in fact comprise two types, they are these: Those of us who know we’re gardeners, and those who pretend they’re not.

1. In fact, I like the architect/gardener terminology precisely because it generalizes beyond writing. (I’ve also heard the equivalent terms outliners vs. discovery writers, or sometimes “planners” vs. “pantsers.”)

2. This per Paris Review interviews in Robinson and Murakami’s case, and Saunders’ self-described approach in places like his Substack.

3. For a more detailed version of this approach, see “Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process” by

Henrik Karlsson

.

4. Borges offers humorous variations on this theme in at least two stories I’m aware of: one in which a map is enlarged to the same size of the area it represents, and another in which an author completes a word-for-word rewrite of Don Quixote.