J K Rowling and the magic of her writing ‘shed’

Authors have traditionally been seen as 'gardeners' or 'architects' but J K Rowling puts forward a new metaphor for the writing process

‘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.

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.

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.

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