Writing Fundamentals: Structure for Longevity
“‘And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.’”
In the first of a series on the fundamentals of writing, we’ll be looking at building writing structures that stand against the sands of time.
In this post:
A quick caveat
What we mean by writing structure
Initial questions to ask
Building in accessibility
Smoothing out the flow
Reviewing structure
A quick caveat
Time changes a lot of things. Attempting to predict exactly what the world will look like in 100 years or more (or even less) is, in short, a fool’s errand. Some work might not even be meant to last a long time (e.g., a social media post). That said, purposefully building a solid structure will help people read beyond a work’s title, along with improving its lifespan.
What we mean by writing structure
Writing structure is a work’s underpinnings. Elements like plot and character motivations, yes, but also headings, chapters, introductions, conclusions and the overall flow of the work. If you’ve ever done an outline for a novel or essay, or brainstormed the layout of a website, that is the structure that organizes the writing.
Your structure might not even be as formal as that. The structure stage of writing is what I tend to refer to as the “throwing spaghetti at the wall” stage. You’re just seeing what sticks. There is room for refining though, which we’ll touch on later.
Initial questions to ask
Before we commit anything to paper, it’s helpful to nail down a few questions before starting.
Essential? No, but it can certainly help avoid a lot of pain and tears when you get to chapter twenty and realize that Madam Persona is actually the villain and that changes everything you wrote before.
Even if you don’t have everything in stone before you start on actual writing (and trust me, you’re in good company), these few questions will still help set you up for success:
What is the genre/medium? This could be the easiest question to answer on the list, or maybe not, if you’re discovering the plot as you write.
What is the purpose and goal? Are you trying to persuade people to buy a product or sign a petition? Are you educating people on a specific topic?
What is the intended publication and usage? Will you be self-publishing an entertainment piece via e-reader? Querying an agent to publish a hardcopy version?
What does your readership look like? What is your audience’s age? Do they have formatting needs particular to their occupation or stage in life? (Picture books and medical dissertations are structured very differently.)
Building in accessibility
Out of all things that hurt a work’s ability to reach its readers, accessibility tops the list. If you have trouble reading something, how likely are you to try and parse it out without being compelled to? Do you think anyone besides the very bored and/or tenacious would?
This means things like format, which typically come at the end of the publication process, are paramount. But so is structure.
Envisioning someone else reading your work at the beginning of the process can be a shortcut to longevity. Approaching a work with the widest possible range of audience needs in mind all but guarantees it. There’s a reason I’ve quoted “Ozymandias” at the top; the poem itself serves as a longstanding warning to writers and artists the world over. No matter how grand or opulent it may be, a work built selfishly will decay once the author is no longer steward to it.
Don’t be Ozymandias.
Accessibility is a category unto itself, which we’ll cover in future posts, but to start off on the right foot: simple is usually best—though often hardest to execute—and breaking up the writing into logical and manageable pieces will aid reader understanding.
Smoothing out the flow
Flow is another important consideration for a work’s structure. This is the progression of an article, story or slide deck. Sometimes, what may seem a logical way to organize a work is not so obvious to our audience, so it’s good to give this some additional thought before moving forward. As with accessibility, picturing someone else reading your work will help ensure others can follow along.
Reviewing structure
Once you’ve conceived of your project’s structure, you might be tempted to jump right into writing, but it can be of great benefit to stop and see if anything needs tweaking before you proceed. “Kill your darlings” is well-known advice when it comes to smoothing out writing structure and flow, but consider this:
Killing your darlings is a lot easier if they haven’t had time to become darling in the first place.
The later on you get in a project, the harder it is to change the structure, and the bigger the change, the more time you’ll have to spend finding all the parts of the draft affected by the change, let alone rewriting.
So maybe Madam Persona was initially a one-off character that your hero meets, as in our previous example, or maybe you’ve chosen to order your historical presentation in chronological order. Sure, a review may not change that, but if there’s a possibility that a character’s role changes, or a different framing device (e.g., starting in present-day) will better ground your audience, reviewing now is a worthwhile investment.
How best to review then? It’s up to you. Some put their project aside for a time—maybe revisiting some concurrent projects in between—or perhaps you’d like to hand it off to a friend for some feedback or an editor for a structural edit.
Whatever your method, devoting some time to your structure is worthwhile. You wouldn’t want to live in a house where the builders sped through the foundation. A good structure takes time to cure and firm up. After all, there’s a lot resting on it.
Mary Kehoe provides structural, stylistic and copy editing services for a variety of written works through her agency, Elixir Editorial. From time to time she dabbles in her own writing projects which tend toward the speculative genre.
She is a member of both Editors Canada and the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), as well as a founding member and former chair of the Toronto Arts & Letters Club writing group. A longtime lover of the English language, Mary is passionate about supporting writers on the journey to inspire the world.
