Essay Architecture
April 18, 2025 • #I just watched this excellent interview with Michael Dean on the How I Write podcast.
Michael is an architect and writer, and his writing project is fascinating.
He’s built a framework for thinking about writing that adapts Christopher Alexander’s concept of pattern languages to writing.
If you’re unfamiliar, Alexander created a way of thinking about design and functionality that gave us a modular, nested framework for how to build spaces — from whole cities down to features within rooms. A “pattern” is a loose and modifiable guideline for how a component of a system should work. More defined than a rule-of-thumb, but less rigid than a rule. So patterns can be refined and adjusted to adapt to different settings.
Thinking about writing this way is interesting. Language has similarities to other complex systems: letters, words, sentences, phrases, paragraphs, stories, narratives. It’s made of modular components that nest together in a hierarchy, where ideas (“wholes”) emerge from the interactions between parts, even at different levels in the hierarchy.
Michael’s system gets more abstract than the simple physical form of the words and sentences, into things like voice and tone, cohesion, motifs, stakes, rhythm, and repetition.
Need to spend some more time with these ideas.