The Butterfly Garden
The Butterfly Garden
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Dot Hutchison on The Butterfly Garden
In their own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why they wrote it
Compulsion before careerBefore the Collector series existed, before the shift from YA to adult thriller, Hutchison described writing in terms that had nothing to do with publication or ambition. The framing was almost involuntary: stories were already in their head, and the question was only whether they got out.
I can’t imagine even a day going by without letting all the stories in my head out to play — sharing them with others is a treat.
Asked about the book that changed how they read, Hutchison named a novel organized entirely around small creatures forming fierce, loyal communities against overwhelming violence. That preoccupation with collective survival against a more powerful antagonist didn’t leave them.
Probably Martin the Warrior, by Brian Jacques — that book changed my whole perspective.
The Butterfly Garden is, among other things, a story about what a group of captive women build together inside a sealed greenhouse. That Brian Jacques planted the seed is less surprising in retrospect.
How they wrote it
Playlists, caves, and characters who surpriseHutchison’s October 2012 Goodreads blog describes beginning their fourth book-specific playlist. The playlist wasn’t a finishing touch; it was a diagnostic tool, a way of knowing whether they understood the book yet before a full draft existed.
Forcing myself to really think about what the music will help me do helps me understand even more about what I want from the book.
The test of whether a playlist was ready came only during the writing itself. Hutchison built toward a particular kind of disappearance: the music was working when it stopped being noticeable at all.
I know a playlist is right when I start the first song, start writing, and look up at some point later at the silence and realize the entire playlist has gone by without pulling me from the words.
Of all the musical choices for that project, one gave Hutchison the most trouble. The challenge wasn’t finding a song that fit the mood; it was finding one that could evoke a sealed, specific place without drawing the reader’s attention to itself.
The single hardest song to find was one that evoked the atmosphere of a specific place, because while I had plenty that could fit the bill, I needed it to be non-intrusive.
For a novel whose central setting is a greenhouse the reader must inhabit psychologically for its entire length, that difficulty finding a song for place-as-atmosphere maps directly onto the book’s core structural challenge.
After finishing a NaNoWriMo attempt, Hutchison drew a counterintuitive conclusion about daily word-count discipline. Long sessions at outside locations they called ‘writing caves,’ which sometimes exceeded nine thousand words in a single sitting, consistently outperformed daily grinding.
Somehow the attempt to write every single day actually made me less productive.
Also in October 2012, Hutchison noted they were three chapters into something new. The project is unnamed, and the timeline means it could be an early stage of what became The Butterfly Garden. What they recorded was not plot or theme but the quality of surprise: characters already behaving in ways they hadn’t anticipated.
I started a new project this week, one that equal parts thrills and terrifies me, and surprises me with unexpectedly funny moments. I love that I’m only three chapters in and it’s already surprising me — to me that says the characters are as real as I can possibly make them.
What they want us to sit with
Worth the heartacheThe most direct statement Hutchison makes about the long arc of creative work comes from a Q&A conducted around their 2013 debut, directed at writers still on the outside of publication. It applies equally to readers sitting with a book that doesn’t resolve cleanly: difficulty and value are not opposites.
It sounds cheesy, but don’t give up. It takes a lot of time and work, and more than a little heartache, to get to where you want to go, but it’s so, SO worth it.
The Butterfly Garden ends not with rescue as relief but with survivors still in the middle of figuring out who they are after captivity. Hutchison’s own word for the process, whether they meant writing or recovery, is the same: worth it, but not quick and not painless.