‘Are you an architect or a gardener?’ That has become one of my go-to questions for authors of fiction. The framing is that of the fantasy writer George R R Martin, who says that all writers fall into one of the two categories: architects plan meticulously and know exactly how the story is going to be shaped before they write a single sentence. Gardeners just drop a seed in the ground, water it, and wait to see how it’s going to grow.
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You might be surprised by how many literary writers are architects – William Boyd always knows exactly how his story is going to end – and how many genre writers (whose twisty plots might seem to imply a bit of planning) are gardeners. Maybe the most successful thriller writer in the language, Lee Child, absolutely makes it up as he goes along, and refuses on principle to go back and tinker with the story: if he writes himself into what looks like a dead-end in the plot, he enjoys the challenge of writing himself out of it. I once heard (though I can’t vouch for it) that Agatha Christie used to wait until the closing pages of the book before deciding who the murderer was.
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E M Forster, who liked to complain that his characters got out of hand and told him what to do: gardener. Vladimir Nabokov, asked whether he shared Forster’s struggles with
unruly characters, responded with magnificent hauteur: ‘My knowledge of Mr Forster’s works is limited to one novel, which I dislike; and anyway, it was not he who fathered that trite little whimsy about characters getting out of hand […] My characters are galley slaves.’ Architect, then.
The shed and the lake
Now J K Rowling mints a new metaphor for the old struggle between inspiration and perspiration, and it seems to me a very good one. In a new interview, she described her creative process thus: ‘I see it as there’s a lake and there’s a shed. Bear with me! And the shed more properly should be called a workshop. I’ve always imagined that there’s something living in that lake that chucks me things that I catch and take to my shed and work on them. So when I read my own writing I often think of it in terms of it’s too much lake and not enough shed. That wasn’t worked on long enough. And other times I think that’s pure shed, there’s nothing of the lake in there. The best writers have an amazing lake and a phenomenal shed.’
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What a lovely conceit! As well as the pleasing image of Rowling standing on the shore of her lake with old gumboots, tractor tyres and funny-looking fish arcing out of the water at her like watery mortar fire and her lugging them into a shed to be gutted, descaled, polished or bolted together, it gives an intuitive sense of the way writers apply their craft to the donnés of the imagination.
Rowling is, inevitably, one of the authors I’ve been looking at in preparing my new book, The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading (available for pre-order at all reputable etc, hem hem), and her lake/shed balance has turned out to be of particular interest. Since she’s also the richest author in the world, I imagine that lake/shed balance is something that might be of interest to the readers of this magazine.
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She writes, knowingly, in a tradition – or a series of traditions. The influence on her of Tolkien, T H White, Enid Blyton, Diana Wynne Jones and many others has frequently been noted. The boarding-school story, especially, had been pre-eminent in children’s literature throughout the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. Rowling single-handedly rescued it from the dustbin of history.
But she did something different. She had on her hands what could have been a potentially limitless franchise, and by book three, when Pottermania had properly taken hold, it was clear that to call this franchise a goldmine would be to underestimate its profitability significantly. She could have done with Harry Potter what was done with Jennings, Biggles, the Famous Five, the Just William stories, Nancy Drew, Willard Price’s Adventure books, and any number of other children’s stories in the canon. Instead, she wrote the story as it had originally been conceived: seven books, with a specific story arc – the work of an architect rather than a gardener.
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Business-wise, the decision to stick to her plan was all lake and no shed: Rowling’s accountant, there in the shed, would have told her that in the making of money the thing to do would be to squeeze the wizarding world until the pips squeaked or, as it were, to dredge the lake. But creatively, in the making of stories, it was the rational – the shed-based – move: sooner or later the thing in the lake would stop chucking her the goods, and the shed would suffer for it.
Shrewd writer, that one, and – in the long term – a shrewd businesswoman.
