So often in school we were told to revere the Classics: to dissect the canon, to divine the author’s intent, to excavate hidden meanings from the techniques employed. But I often wrestled with this—not because I found the study tiresome, but because the texts themselves felt cold. They didn’t connect with me. They didn’t move me. I had little interest in what I was told I should treasure.
The gardener doesn’t fill their beds with plants they find tedious simply because they’re popular in a neighbour’s patch. That way lies uniformity—streets lined with identical rosebushes and hydrangeas, all purchased from the same garden center, as dull as the 1970s suburban sprawl. No—the astute gardener cultivates what brings them joy, gathering inspiration from wherever beauty grows.
During these dark and wintry nights, my wife and I often watch a film in the evening. We recently re-watched a cutdown version of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, toward the end of which Bilbo is found holding an acorn. He tells Thorin:
“I picked it up in Beorn’s garden. … I’m going to plant it in my garden, in Bag End. One day it’ll grow. And every time I look at it, I’ll remember. Remember everything that happened: the good, the bad… and how lucky I am that I made it home.”
- Bilbo Baggins, The Battle of the Five Armies
Often when I walk through our garden, I won’t see plants. I’ll see people. My mother-in-law gifted me some snowdrops from their old house in Surrey. Now, every January the garden bursts into life with brilliant white blooms. My wife gave me a grapevine for my 30th birthday that I look forward to enjoying the fruits of each year; my sister gifted me an agapanthus that explodes like a purple firework in our front garden every July. With all of these I take great delight, remembering the people closest to me.
As with the cultivation of gardens, so it is with the writing craft. We shouldn’t plant vain imitations of another’s work. What blooms beautifully in their soil may wither in ours—not because the technique is flawed, but because it wasn’t chosen from genuine understanding. We must cultivate our own beds with what we love.
I was reminded of this recently while watching Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. There is a specific mastery in how he stretches the tension—particularly in the opening and famous tavern scene—until it feels remarkably like an elastic band pulled to its absolute limit. Just when you feel the snap is imminent, he introduces a new element from the background, or perhaps out of left field—like the German officer who decided to have his own private drink in that very bar.
Instead of relieving the pressure, this ratchets the tension even further, beyond what the audience thought possible. It’s a terrifying, nail-biting back and forth that continues to relentlessly escalate, a tightening of a corkscrew with every moment, until—SNAP! Everything descends into chaos.
It creates a visceral reaction. But as a scholar of the craft, enjoyment is only the first step. I immediately came away, thinking to myself: “I must get a copy of that script!”
The Anatomy of the Hydrangea
One of our neighbours has a distinct blue hydrangea, which I’ve enjoyed for some years through the window of our living room. I wanted to replicate this in our garden, particularly because the neighbours were getting older and I suspected it wouldn’t be long before they moved away.
Yet even with a cutting of the same plant, I wasn’t able to replicate the colour. It grew well enough, but when it came to late spring and early summer, the blooms were distinctly pink, rather than blue. Our neighbour likewise couldn’t understand why. It wasn’t until they were pruning it back the next February and digging around its base that they found the answer: an old, rusty iron nail!
To enjoy a flower is to appreciate its scent and colour; to understand it, one must look at the stem, the root system, and, in this case, the soil.
The writing craft is much the same. James Scott Bell, in Writing Dazzling Dialogue, observes that screenwriters make for excellent teachers for novelists. Without the luxury of internal monologue, they must rely entirely on spoken word and subtext:
Dialogue is not real life conversation. It is a semblance of it, an artful deception… the reader wants to see the characters struggling, and dialogue is the primary weapon in the struggle.
James Scott Bell - Writing Dazzling Dialogue
When we watch a film like Inglourious Basterds and find ourselves on the edge of our seat, we are witnessing that “artful deception” at its peak. Find that script! Strip away the actors’ performances, the cinematography, and the set dressing—dig deeper and look at the bare soil in which the scene grew. How was the silence written? How was the tension formatted on the page? By studying the structure beneath the performance, we move from being a spectator walking through a garden full of life in midsummer, to a gardener understanding the careful cultivation required in a scene that made us feel deeply.
Cross-Pollination
We shouldn’t limit this study to the visual medium. Inspiration is often found in the unlikeliest places.
The same applies to songs. When lyrics or rhythm move us, we shouldn’t let the moment pass like a breeze carrying a beautiful scent. Capture those fleeting impressions. Ask why they resonated. Was it the rhythm? The specific imagery? The economy of words?
Natalie Goldberg, in her seminal work Writing Down the Bones, describes this accumulation of sensory details using a metaphor that’s close to my heart:
“Our bodies are garbage heaps: we collect experience, and from the decomposition of the thrown out eggshells, spinach leaves, coffee grinds, and old steak bones of our minds come nitrogen, heat, and very fertile soil.”
Natalie Goldberg - Writing Down the Bones
Capture these thoughts however you can—in notebooks, phone notes, wherever works for your mind. Categorise them however you do best. I mentioned in my previous blog post how I capture highlights from Kindle and store them in my Second Brain Obsidian Vault. The same applies here. By storing these snippets of films, song lyrics, and even game scripts, which are much like movies and television shows these days, you’re creating what Goldberg describes: a compost heap of experience, rich with the decomposed essence of everything that’s moved you.
When you refer to them later, you’re using them to fertilise your own ideas, allowing your own original concepts to come to fruition in soil rich with the nutrients of what you love.
Grafting the Joy
There is a profound difference between the writer who crafts a scene because they think they ought to write it that way, and the writer who writes from a deep understanding of what brings them joy. Never write for anyone else. Write for yourself.
In studying what you love—whether the rhythm of poetry, the narrative arc of a ballad, the tension of a film, or the environmental storytelling of games—you discover the shape of your own taste. You learn how to graft those techniques onto your own work, making them yours.
By understanding how to cultivate such moments, you’ll craft scenes that satisfy you deeply. And if you write from that place of deep, studied enjoyment, with a little luck and fair weather, others will enjoy the fruits of your labour for years to come; and you may even surprise yourself.
