Musing on Gardeners, Architects and Speakers
In Q3, I have chosen the hobby of fiction writing as part of my regularly scheduled hyperfixation program. As such, I have been consuming copious amounts of YouTube writing classes.
The prevailing theory of the writing styles is this: There are so-called “Gardeners” who cultivate the story as they go. They plant some seeds and see how they grow and blossom. There are also “Architects” who meticulously plan and construct a story. All the blueprints and plans must be clearly designed approved, re-approved before it can be built. They are also, perhaps more formally, called “Discovery” writers and “Outline” writers.
That brought me to my current musing. Can stories truly be constructed?
Now, I don’t approach this from an academic point of view, I am sure the scholars who have spent decades building the lexicon will dispute and disprove everything I say in this essay. Rather, I approach this from the POV of a lover of stories, a hopeless romantic that spends more time with fictional characters than real ones, and perhaps a complete moron who has had her heart broken by more men of pen and paper than that of flesh and bone*.
Can stories truly be constructed?
I do not believe they can be. My own reading experience (and some limited fiction writing experience, almost all private**) tells me stories are so much more than any deterministic costruct. You can break them down into patterns, formulae even, but the good ones, regardless of whether the shoe fits, are always so much more than the formula that breeds them.
I simply cannot fathom that even the Architects construct stories.
I think the stories simply are, almost prophetically channeled from the Ether by the best and the most attuned. It is the method of their tuning that changes amongst the writers. Some attune to the story that was meant to be spoken by them by letting it come to them, some attune to it by building a home for the story to settle in. But the story exists in and of itself.
Speakers. All of them are Speakers.
* I am still heartbroken by Solas, I fear I will never recover from him.
** Aside from that one historical fiction play I wrote in 8th grade, and to my immesurable horror, that got acted in front of the whole school, for which I also had to do the casting and directing.