Stop fighting your creative nature
A Practical Guide for Busy Professionals to Find Their Perfect Writing Method
Have you ever noticed how some writers seem to ship book after book?
While others struggle for years with a single manuscript? Many aspiring writers burn out following someone else's process, fighting their own creative nature. The key to consistency is finding what works for you.
Brandon Sanderson in his YouTube course talks about how writers fall somewhere on the spectrum between two archetypes: The Gardener and The Architect.
In this guide, you'll discover how to harness your archetype to finish your novel.
Understanding your nature
Your goal as a writer should be to write til the day you die. Supposedly, Michael Crichton died sitting at his writing desk.
So how do we approach the work so we can keep going?
Let's start with motivation. To do something, our brains need to believe the plan we made will achieve the desired outcome. If we lose confidence in the plan, then we lose the will to act on it. Cultivating a sense of enthusiasm towards your work is the secret sauce to keeping up with a daily writing practice.
Which brings us to the major difference between our two archetypes: the way they derive enjoyment from their work.
The Gardener Archetype
The gardener starts with an idea for a character, a setting, or an inciting incident, then dives right in.
This initial idea is like a seed. The gardener will grow several ideas simultaneously from the bottom-up. Then depending on the strength of each idea, they will prune some to create space for others.
For a gardener, the excitement of writing is discovering the story as you go. If the gardener were to outline, it would take out all the fun and kill their motivation. E.L. Doctorow 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.' Classic Gardener.
The gardener empties their mind of intention and lets the story show them the way. Gardeners revise a lot and end up putting effort into ideas they later cut. (Inevitable for both archetypes but more so for the gardener.)
A gardener likens writing to a surprising conversation with their subconscious.
Examples:
Stephen King
George R.R. Martin
George Saunders
The Architect Archetype
The architect builds the story out via an outline before the act of writing it.
For the architect, the joy of writing comes from bringing their vision into reality. The architect enjoys creating a grand design from the top-down. They approache a novel like a complicated puzzle to solve.
Discovery still happens during the process of writing by filling in the gaps of the outline. An outline is a compressed version of story after all.
Architects ship books more quickly and frequently than gardeners. The architect takes pride in their efficiency and dislikes endless revision cycles.
Examples:
John Updike
Brandon Sanderson
Haruki Murakami
How to find your archetype?
So how do you go about figuring out which one works best for you?
It’s not a very satisfying answer, but you need to find what works for you. If what you’re doing now isn’t working, then try the other approach. Think of it as a troubleshooting tool.
I do a lot experimentation my process, probably too much. It would be more productive if I stuck with whatever came intuitively. Maybe it's because I grew up in the age of pragmatic non-fiction. Or perhaps it's a general sense of FOMO that some process might be better than the other.
Either way, I have been experimenting with both. I have tried George Saunders method from his Substack. Now, I am trying an outlining method inspired by Brandon Sanderson and Rachel Aaron.
In the end, I fall somewhere in between the two. I use one or the other based on the task at hand. For example, I like gardening for short fiction and outlining for long fiction.
So try them and let me know what you think.