November 2008

Using the Flowers Paradigm to Write More Efficiently

by Bryan A. Garner

Adapted from Trial (May 1997)
 
Most writing advice focuses on the end product. But we shouldn't neglect the process by which we produce our words. In important ways, the process affects the product.

Now, I can't tell you what type of pen to use or what to sip on while you're working. No one can teach the physical aspects of writing. But I've learned that it's quite possible to teach the mental aspects of writing.

Before we get to that, though, think of the ways in which legal writers so frequently get mired:

•  By starting to write in earnest before they fully understand what they're writing about — and then treating that draft as something sacrosanct.
•  By sidestepping the creative stage altogether, so that the final product isn't nearly as imaginative as it could be.
•  By writing and sharpening sentences before knowing what the overall structure will be — and thereby wasting valuable time. When structural changes later emerge, as they inevitably will, much of this early work will have to be either scrapped or modified.
•  By allowing their critical side to interrupt throughout the process.

How can you avoid these pitfalls?

The Flowers Paradigm: Madman — Architect — Carpenter — Judge

Several years ago, Dr. Betty S. Flowers, a LawProse instructor who teaches in the University of Texas English Department, devised a shrewd new way of dramatizing the writing process. Her approach helps minimize common problems and maximize both efficiency and effectiveness.

It breaks down the writing process into four sequential steps — each one based on a "character" or personality that we all have within us: Madman, Architect, Carpenter, and Judge.(1)

The Madman "is full of ideas, writes crazily and perhaps rather sloppily, gets carried away by enthusiasm and desire, and if really let loose, could turn out 10 pages an hour."(2) Typically, the legal writer doesn't really "write" at all during this stage, but instead takes copious notes, jotting down ideas and possible approaches to a problem.

The Madman's nemesis is the Judge — one's skeptical, hypercritical self, who must be reined in until the final step. But many of us have an out-of-control Judge, who is easily recognizable. As Flowers describes the Judge:

He's been educated and knows a sentence fragment when he sees one. He peers over your shoulder and says, "That's trash!" with such authority that the Madman loses his crazy confidence and shrivels up. You know the Judge is right; after all, he speaks with the voice of an English teacher. But for all his sharpness of eye, he can't create anything.(3)

The key to defusing this battle between Madman and Judge is to keep the Judge at bay until the end of the writing process. Otherwise, the Judge will stifle the Madman altogether.

But what about the other two steps?

Once the Madman has generated lots of ideas, the Architect takes them, makes connections between them, and starts planning their structure. Initially, the Architect's work is nonlinear, but it will end up as an outline, possessing an arrangement that seems obvious to most people today but was a great insight when Aristotle devised it: a beginning, a middle, and an end. And if the Architect functions satisfactorily, you'll know each intermediate point — step by step — while writing the middle parts of the piece. In fact, the more explicit the architecture, the better.

Then comes the Carpenter, who starts actually building the draft. Here, the writing begins in earnest. And because the draft has a logical plan, the Carpenter's work is greatly eased: it's like filling in the blanks. You simplify the process of building when you have the Architect's specifications laid out before you.

Charles Alan Wright, the eminent legal scholar and outstanding writer, made this very point in a Scribes Journal essay in which he described his writing process:

For my kind of nonfiction it is necessary first to have a complete grasp of whatever subject it is I am going to be writing about. This we can take for granted, though the research is often long and tedious. The next stage, and to me the hardest of all, is organization. I never sit down to the keyboard — in the old days it was a typewriter, then an electronic typewriter, and in recent years it has been a computer — until I am clear in my mind how I am going to organize whatever it is that I am doing.(4)

That's why, earlier in his essay, Wright said that writing is easy — it's the preparation that's difficult.

The most important thing about the Carpenter stage is to write freely, simply filling in the details according to the architectural specs. If you stop to edit, you open the door for the Judge, and this is just the type of interference your Carpenter doesn't need. But suppose you get stuck in a certain part. Just move on to the next section: you may have to leave a little hole here and there.

Understand that the carpenter has some discretion — deciding how to finish off a corner, how to build the passage from one room to the next. Some architectural details, in other words, are left to the Carpenter.

Once your Carpenter has built a draft, you can call in your Judge, who will look for problems as well as ways to refine the draft. The Judge will check for many things: whether there are transitions between paragraphs, whether the verbs need strengthening, and so on. And the Judge will check many grammatical points, too — everything from comma splices to misplaced modifiers to subject–verb agreement problems. The Judge is an inspector for quality control.

Each of these four characters needs time alone on the stage. If you shortchange any of them, your writing will suffer.

Two Qualms Answered

Is it possible, in the hurly-burly of a busy law practice, to go through these four steps with every writing project? Perhaps not with every one. But surely in the space of an hour-long writing project, you can spend 10 minutes on Madman, five on Architect, 25 on Carpenter, and 10 on Judge. The rest of the time you need for short breaks in between, both to step back from the project and to put yourself in the mind of another character.

But isn't it true that we all approach problems differently? Isn't that the lesson of Myers-Briggs and other personality tests? Yes, and Flowers designed the paradigm with this in mind. You see, everyone is most comfortable working in a particular compartment of the brain. The Flowers approach ensures that you benefit from all that your brain has to offer, not just from the mental realm you're most comfortable with.

I, for example, spent years neglecting the Architect. I wrote highly polished sentences and paragraphs, and people who read my stuff generally thought of me as a good writer. But as I now look at what I wrote in those days, it seems a highly polished mishmash. The organization was unpredictable. Now that has changed — and writing has become relatively painless for me, and much quicker. I do what Professor Wright mentioned: I plan every writing project.

The Advantages of the Flowers Paradigm

Flowers mentioned eight advantages to using her paradigm.(5) Let me paraphrase them:

1.  It's easy to remember.
2.  It stresses the sequential nature of the writing process — that you're likely to get better results if you work through the Madman stage first rather than returning to it after you've spent three hours crafting sentences.
3.  It dramatizes the need for rewriting — the Judge stage — and gives a sense of individual purpose to every draft.
4.  It separates the writing task into manageable steps and lets you enjoy each stage, since you can focus on it alone.
5.  It defuses the conflict that often arises when you try to write for an authority figure. When writing cautiously, we'll often produce dry, technically correct prose that is devoid of creativity, naturalness, and flow.
6.  It offers a way to deal with self-image problems that sometimes interfere with the writing process. If, for example, you see yourself as a creator, you might be impatient with the polishing and careful proofing that the Judge can supply — and that every draft needs. Similarly, if you see yourself as a consummate critic, you may have a highly "repressed" style characterized by dry but technically correct prose.
7.  It gives everyone a new language for critiquing drafts, one that doesn't shove the editor exclusively into the role of Judge. Now an editor can look at a colleague's brief and say, "Try playing the Madman more with this section," rather than just picking up a red pen and marking away.
8.  It clarifies what you can and can't teach about writing. The Madman stage is personal and subjective, a private area left almost exclusively to the writer. The Judge can be taught from good writing texts. But in the Architect and Carpenter stages — where many writers are least experienced and usually least well trained — a teacher can be very helpful.

Many writers need more help with their writing process than with anything else. For them, the Flowers paradigm can be invaluable. 

Bryan A. Garner is editor in chief of Black's Law Dictionary and the author of many leading works on legal style, including A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage, The Elements of Legal Style, The Redbook: A Manual on Legal Style, The Winning Brief, and Securities Disclosure in Plain English. His 879-page Garner's Modern American Usage is widely considered an authority on questions of English usage. He has taught at the University of Texas School of Law in Austin. Garner founded LawProse, a provider of CLE training in legal writing, editing, and drafting, in 1991. For more information, visit www.lawprose.org.

NOTES
 1.  Flowers, Betty S., "Madman, Architect, Carpenter, Judge: Roles and the Writing Process," 44 Proceedings of the Conference of College Teachers of English, 7–10 (1979).
 2.  Id. at 7.
 3.  Id.
 4.  Wright, Charles Alan, "How I Write," 4 Scribes J. Legal Writing, 87, 88 (1993).
5. Flowers, supra note 1, at 9.