Writing is not really about words. Writing is certainly not about grammar or spelling. Writing isn’t really even about communication. Writing is about structure.
A writer is somebody who packages thought.
To do that, writers use words. And the objective of packaged thought is communication.
But the act of writing is about packaging thought. I think it’s a lot like knitting in that it involves having a pattern and making a bunch of choices–type of yarn, color, stitches–and then the writer goes to work doing something that is fairly methodical and can be made to look deceptively easy.
Most people think they can write (just like most people, left on their own in a car on a clogged freeway think they can sing). They base this on the fact that they have seen people write and they have read written things. It just doesn’t seem that hard. It’s sort of like me watching somebody knit. I know the main stitches. I could watch somebody and probably make a few stitches, possibly even do a whole row–but I am not skilled at the work it takes to knit a sweater or socks (you have to make the knitting change shape, getting narrower here, wider there, or go in a circle).
The absolute key to good writing is architecture–structure. You have to build the article or novel or brochure properly. Some people do that in an outline. That’s an English teacher kind of thing, but I’m not knocking it because it can work. But it can be useful to sketch out your story. Use Mindjet software, if you have it, or just get a legal pad and a pen and start to draw boxes or buckets or whatever you want to hold your main points. Identify those main points. Show how you intend to move from bucket to bucket.
Once a piece of writing is poured out in terms of the foundation, the words can change. As long as no changes are made to the foundation in the review or revision process, it’s pretty easy to modify writing. You can call it polishing or procrastinating, but you can work on a well-crafted piece of writing for years and never really jar it from its foundation.
Build a faulty foundation and no amount of editing can save your piece from rejection or criticism.
The worst revisions in the world occur when somebody wants changes made that mess up the foundation. This isn’t because they’re being difficult. They usually just want the change made. But if somebody tears up your foundation, you often have to start over.
This happened to me once with a brochure. I built a brochure based on six key product features, culminating in the sixth feature which was considered by the manufacturer to be the strongest one. I ended with that sixth feature for a good reason–it actually sort of tied together four of the other five features. In other words, you had to understand all of the cool features of this product to see why the killer feature was really killer. The designer and I put this sixth feature inside the brochure but on a big two-page spread that kind of ended the brochure with a bang.
All along the way in the brochure, we hinted at this feature, so it was sort of a slow progression building up to the monster feature.
The guy who commissioned the brochure saw it and loved it. And he read it and studied it and eventually came back with a change. That’s normal, even expected. However, what he wanted was for us to lead with the monster feature.
That required a total re-do of the brochure, which confused him. Being a non-writer, he didn’t understand we couldn’t just cut-and-paste that section and pop it up front. It didn’t make sense any more the way the brochure was constructed.
Now in all fairness, the guy’s suggestion was a good one. There’s a lot to be said with leading with your strongest feature. We didn’t do that because it was less logical, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth doing. The designer and I had to start over–almost–and lead with the last feature. The big killer two-page spread really didn’t work (you can’t really start a song with a crescendo and you can’t open a brochure with a powerful spread). We had to reformulate how we dealt with the other features. The brochure became more sequential rather than progressing to a big climax.
I don’t remember how the brochure did. We completed the project and the client was happy. But I think he was mystified that the change took so long to make and that it resulted in a very different-looking end product.
That’s why it’s important to build the right structure first. Word changes are easy to make. Images can be swapped out. You can even monkey around with layout and order of some things. But you need the right structure.
Just like knitting a sweater.
