Specifics vs Structures: a crucial insight into your creative process

Possibly the most useful insight I've ever had into the writing of fiction, creative non-fiction, narrative and academic non-fiction

Many years ago, a photographer friend told me something he’d learnt in his day job from an industrial psychologist: that people can be divided into those who find comfort in detail, and those who find comfort in structure.

And a couple of days ago a post over at the always-interesting Kelcey Ervick’s Habit of Art substack reminded me of that. Kelcey’s post is about structure, and it’s titled ‘The most powerful, overlooked, difficult element of a story (or a painting)’. It’s a very useful post, but I found myself thinking, Yes, but—.

Yes, across my work with writers of fiction, creative non-fiction, and narrative, academic and scholarly non-fiction, I’ve had plenty of students who found thinking in terms of structure difficult.

But I’ve had just as many students in all those fields whose stories, narratives and arguments arrive naturally and easily as a structure: what’s hard for those writers is getting that structure to play out in the specifics of each line and paragraph.