An excerpt from the recently updated edition of The Elements of Writing:
Carpentry, said Jack McClintock, a writer who chronicled the construction of his own home in Florida, “is largely a matter if getting the sequences right. If you perform Job C before Job A, you end up … wasting time and materials, getting annoyed, and making mistakes. Oldtimers call it the fool tax.”
Writing is like construction. Like a carpenter—or musician or sculptor or other creator—you create something by gathering raw materials and giving them a shape. You make sure the pieces all fit together. You determine where one piece of the structure ends and another begins.
And when you get something wrong—or get it right, but in the wrong order—you pay a fool tax.
So what’s the right sequence? And how do you design and build a piece to do the work you need it to do?
Start with the mantra of The Writing Code: All writing is a journey. Before all else, know where you want to start and finish. Know your destination and how to you plan to get there. When you know the beginning and end, you can create the best path—a straight line or a path with side trips or twists and turns. As long as you know the journey—where you want to start and end—you will always be able to get back on the track.
Some authors want to take a direct trip from one point to another. Others want to raise tension along the way, with hidden and meandering paths. Others want to give the reader a series of recurring experiences. What shape you choose depends on how direct—or how much of a tease—you want to be with the reader.
As you write, offer the reader signposts along the way. When we drive in the Interstate, we look for signs that show us our progress: “Thank You for Visiting Massachusetts” … “Welcome to Connecticut” … “Hartford: 40 Miles” … “New York 68 Miles” … and so on. To make transitions, readers sometimes need those direct statements.
Most readers, though, they just need to see where they are. So just make sure that all your steps—all your paragraphs—follow a logical sequence. So you don’t have to pay the fool tax.
