What writers & others say
“The key to a good story structure is to write a great beginning and a great ending and keep them close together.”
— Anonymous
“Men die because they cannot join the beginning to the end.”
— Alcmeon of Croton, a philosopher and teacher in the Pythagorean school quoted by Kenneth Atchity in A Writer’s Time
“As narratives, they felt defiantly shapeless and almost humorously static. They didn’t head toward a destination; they went down culs-de-sac, performing frequent U-turns and handbrake skids; and they waited in jams. In particular, they didn’t ‘end.’ They just stopped.”
— Martin Amis, author and critic, on Don DeLillo’s novels
“Text structure does have an important effect on learning. The better organized the text and the more apparent the structure to the reader, the higher the probability that the reader will learn from reading.”
— Bonnie Armbruster, Ph.D., professor of education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
“Comprehension and composition bear a reciprocal relation to each other.”
— Robert C. Calfee, Ph.D, professor of education and psychology at Stanford University
“‘Begin at the beginning,’ the King said, gravely, ‘and go on till you come to the end; then stop.’”
— Lewis Carroll, in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
“In order to write something big, it really helps me to think of the constituent parts. What are the basic units or elements? What are the chapters? That helps with my research — filling up my chapter files. And it helps with my drafting — writing one chapter at a time.”
— Roy Peter Clark, author, How to Write Short
“Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing.”
— Joan Didion, American journalist, essayist and novelist
“Prose is architecture. It’s not interior design.”
— Ernest Hemingway, Nobel Prize-winning novelist
“The crafts of writing and carpentry are deceptively simple. The carpenter has to begin with a plan; the writer must begin with a thought. There must be at least the germ of an idea. Before the first board is nailed to the second board, or the first word connected to the second word, there has to be some clear notion of where we expect to be when we have finished nailing or writing.”
— James J. Kilpatrick, author, The Writer’s Art
“The catalog entries now had lengthy analytical essays and illuminating reproductions of other pictures, whether they related or not: a minimalist Agnes Martin might be accompanied by an illustration of the Mona Lisa, whose best connection to the picture in question might come under a TV game show category, ‘things that are rectangular.’”
— Steve Martin, author, in An Object of Beauty
“Shakespeare wrote his sonnets within a strict discipline, fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, rhyming in three quatrains and a couplet. Were his sonnets dull? Mozart wrote his sonatas within an equally rigid discipline — exposition, development, and recapitulation. Were they dull?”
— David Ogilvy, “the father of advertising”
“God is in the structure.”
— Richard Preston, author, The Demon in the Freezer, quoted by Jack Hart in A Writer’s Coach
“Organization is what you do before you do it, so when you do it, it’s not all messed up.”
— Winnie The Pooh
Draw readers in with the best structure
Writers say, “We use the inverted pyramid because readers stop reading after the first paragraph.”
But in new research, readers say, “We stop reading after the first paragraph because you use the inverted pyramid.”
Learn a structure that’s been proven in the lab to outperform the inverted pyramid at our feature-writing workshop.
