Setting Your Writing Premises

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Early in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, the hero--an aspiring architect named Howard Roark--explains his approach to architecture:

"Here are my rules: what can be done with one substance must never be done with another. No two materials are alike. No two sites on earth are alike. No two buildings have the same purpose. The purpose, the site, the material determine the shape. Nothing can be reasonable or beautiful unless it's made by one central idea, and the idea sets every detail. A building is alive, like a man. Its integrity is to follow its own truth, its own single theme, and to serve its own single purpose. A man doesn't borrow pieces of his body. A building doesn't borrow hunks of its soul. Its maker gives it the soul and every wall, window and stairway to express it."

Shortly thereafter, he seeks out a job with the architect he most admires, Henry Cameron. When he shows Cameron his drawings, Cameron responds:

"So you think they're good? Well, they're awful. It's unspeakable. It's a crime. Look...look at that. What in Christ's name was your idea? What possessed you to indent that plane here? Did you just want to make it pretty, because you had to patch something together? Who do you think you are? Guy  Francon, God help you? . . . Look at this building, you fool! You get an idea like this and you don't know what to do with it! You stumble on a magnificent thing and you have to ruin it! Do you know how much you've got to learn?"

What's going on here? Roark knows the basic principles of architecture. He studied the foundational skills in college and understands the basic process of selecting a single theme for a building that will set every detail. What more does he have to learn?

What Roark is missing is all the lower-level architectural premises he needs to implement his architectural principles. Yes, he knows the central idea of a building should set every detail, but he doesn't know how to translate the theme into the countless sub-decisions designing a building involves: for example, whether or not to indent a plane. Without worked out standards for when to indent a plane, he has to rely on what strikes him as "pretty."

Roark's challenge applies to aspiring writers as much as it does to aspiring architects. It's relatively easy to learn the principles of writing: that you need to select a theme, that you need to take into account the reader's context, that you need to motivate the reader, that you need to concretize your abstractions. What's hard is to know how to implement these principles.

Implementation requires countless lower-level premises that you can only discover and automatize through practice. For example, you probably know that your writing needs to have a logical structure. The reader has to be able to follow your argument. He can never be confused why you're saying what you're saying and how it relates to what came before.

But to implement that resolve, you need further premises--particularly premises about transitions. I often see writers use sub-headings to mask unclear, for instance. One of my writing premises is: the piece should read smoothly if you deleted all the sub-headers.

How do you form and automatize writing premises? Practice, yes. But there are two kinds of practice that can help you progress much faster. The first is feedback from the equivalent of a Henry Cameron.

The second is to edit other people's work (or at least think about other people's work as if you were editing it). It's far easier to spot flaws in something you haven't created. If you identify the flaws in conceptual terms, and then think about where you commit the same mistakes, you'll help formulate the premises you need to improve your writing.