Sharon White: THINK LIKE AN ARCHITECT • Writing Tips

Sharon White
THINK LIKE AN ARCHITECT

I’ve been thinking about architecture a lot lately. Probably because I’ve been watching Grand Designs on BritBox to wind down after dinner. The houses are amazing inventions that jut out over gullies, or along busy roads, or are plopped right in the middle of ponds. Usually there’s some drama along the way as the host comes back again and again to see how the owners are getting on with the project.

I just finished what I think is a draft of the book I’ve been writing about New Zealand artist Anna Caselberg. For years I’ve been wrestling with the source material on my computer—hundreds of photos of letters and diary pages, transcripts of interviews, and artwork. The floor of my workroom has been covered with pages of the book. I’ve been thinking of it as a home for Anna’s story. It’s only recently that I understood I needed some scaffolding, some way of giving a shape to the whole book. It was floating in time for months until my husband suggested telling the story in a more chronological way. I had to think about this for a few days. It seemed like there was too much story and too many timelines, including my two trips to New Zealand, to squeeze the story I wanted to tell into a conventional shape.

The most successful projects on Grand Designs have cleverly combined disparate elements, like an old garden wall in one and timber beams from an ancient mill in another, into a coherent whole that also includes new construction. This reminds me of a recent Philadelphia Inquirer article by Inga Saffron about Calder Gardens, a new art institution embedded in the bustling boulevard of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Center City Philadelphia. The architects have pulled off a tricky delight, Saffron wrote, calling it a “strikingly subversive design” that “burrows into the meadowy landscape,” unlike the other art institutions on the Parkway.

I can’t remember why I decided to think of my book as three parts, but that did the trick. I saved the sections of the book as separate files, so that I wasn’t floundering any longer with this huge building with no supports. I could organize each section into the beginning, middle, and end of Anna Caselberg’s life. The book still wasn’t a traditional biography—too many digressions and snippets of memoir—but at least the places where she lived and the landscapes where she painted had sorted themselves out.

“The building is made almost entirely of wood with huge beams of laminated ply giving warmth and strength to the place.” I love this description, which a friend in New Zealand gave of the new Court Theater in Christchurch. I like thinking of the three sections of my book, now combined as one large file, as “huge beams” adding “warmth and strength” to Anna’s story. I think it’s important to let a project find the right form. Eventually, if the writer looks again at the blueprints of the project, the pieces will speak to each other with a little prodding. This is especially the case for a large manuscript.

Sharon White is the author of several books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including Vanished Gardens: Finding Nature in Philadelphia, winner of the AWP award in creative nonfiction. Her first novel, Minato Sketches, won the Rosemary Daniell Prize and is published by Minerva Rising Press. Betty Books, an imprint of WTAW, will publish If the Owl Calls, a mystery, later this month (November 2025). Recent nonfiction appears in Solstice Literary Magazine, Miracle Monocle, Cleaver, Ways of Walking, Switch, DIAGRAM, The Rupture, and Nowhere Magazine. Sharon White is an Associate Professor Emerita at Temple University.