Page 25 - Perfect English Grammar: The Indispensable Guide to Excellent Writing and Speaking

Start at the end. If your hero dies in the end, write that first. Then, write what
happened right before the hero died. And then write what happened before that.

Keep working backward until you reach the beginning of the story. This also
works for speeches, essays, and even complicated emails: put down your final,

summarizing thoughts, and then justify them.

Write the fun part first: the big love scene, the explanation of all the
convincing survey data, the recital of the project that won you a promotion, the

anecdote that perfectly illustrates the spirit of what you’re doing.

Write simply. Write below your level of learning. Write for a five-year-old.

Don’t try to write the most educated first line ever. Write to be understood.
Write what helps you understand what your goals are: Who is your audience?

What do you want? What do they want? Who are the characters? What
motivates them?

Tell it like gossip or a family memory. Begin as if you’re at a family reunion,
or on the front porch, or at the hair salon, or as if you’re an old-timer who wants

to pass something along to the youngsters: There’s a story I’ve been meaning
to tell you. It’s about . . .

■ When I think back to that time, I remember feeling . . .
■ When I was a child, I had just one goal. It was . . .

Make a puzzle for yourself. Think of yourself as both a puzzle-maker and a
puzzle-solver. You don’t know which paragraph will be the first one until

you’ve written them all down and can see what’s what. Then, you can rearrange
each of the bits until you find a pleasing order. Hunter S. Thompson was known

for sending his stories to the editors of Rolling Stone in long streams of faxes.
Once in the office, the faxes were cut into pages and paragraphs, and then

rearranged on the floor: editing was like solving a jigsaw puzzle.

2.3 Paragraph Structure