2 Matching Annotations
  1. Dec 2017
    1. “I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners,” George R. R. Martin said: The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they’re going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there’s going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed, and water it.
    2. There needs to be a term for an alternative way of building worlds, the world-building-in-negative that is practiced by Kavan and Abe (and forebears and contemporaries like Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, John Hawkes, and J. G. Ballard). Some have called this process “inferred world-building” or “world-conjuring,” but “world-blocking” may be more apt. The term works in opposing directions to get at the paradox of these types of texts. A “block” is something that obstructs, but is also a unit, like a brick, for building (i.e., “building block”). The verb “to block” means to hinder or hamper, but it also means to plot out the movements of an actor on a stage or movie set. World-blockers, then, build worlds through obstruction; they block out the moves of their world by blocking our full access to them.