Martin has a favorite way of explaining how writers work, and he's been repeating it for years. He says there are two kinds: architects and gardeners. He counts himself firmly among the gardeners, and that one choice explains a lot about how his books grow.

The Direct Answer
A gardener, by his own description.
Architects plan the whole structure in advance. Gardeners plant a seed and see what grows, and Martin has said he's much more the second kind.

The Two Kinds of Writers

The distinction is simple enough that writers everywhere have borrowed it. An architect designs the whole building before laying a single brick. They know how many rooms there will be, where the plumbing runs, how high the roof sits, all of it drawn up before construction starts. A gardener works the other way around. They dig a hole, drop in a seed, water it, and wait to see what pushes up through the soil.

There are two kinds of writers. There are architects and gardeners. The architects do blueprints before they drive the first nail. The gardeners just dig a hole and plant the seed and see what comes up.

George R.R. Martin, 2011

He's quick to add that most writers are a blend of both, sitting somewhere on the line between the two poles. Then he places himself. He's much more a gardener than an architect, which means he starts with a rough sense of the seed, a fantasy premise or a character who interests him, and lets the thing surprise him as it grows.

What Gardening Looks Like in Practice

For Martin this isn't a metaphor he admires from a distance. He writes by it. Characters he expected to keep alive die on the page. Minor players he planted for a single scene grow into central figures over thousands of words. He's talked about not knowing where a chapter will end when he starts it, and about following the story down paths he never mapped. That freedom is the whole point of the method, and it's also, by his own admission, part of why The Winds of Winter has taken so long. A garden grows on its own schedule, and you can't blueprint your way out of a tangle once the vines are in it.

There's a cost and a payoff built into working this way. The cost is uncertainty and time, since a gardener can't promise a finish date for something that's still deciding its own shape. The payoff is the sense of discovery that ends up on the page, the feeling that even the author didn't see the turn coming. For how this sits alongside his tools and daily schedule, see the full George R.R. Martin writing routine.

What You Can Steal