How HewnTree helps me structure my creative writing
Michael Schneider4 min read
A requirements tool for creative writing sounds like a contradiction, or at least like something only a product owner would do to a perfectly innocent hobby. I understand the reaction. Structure and creativity get filed as opposites, and the image of running a story through the same thing I’d use to scope a software feature is a little absurd.
I do it anyway, and it’s become one of my favourite uses.
Creative work dies in the same gap
The gap I keep coming back to, the one between a vivid idea and a thing you can actually build, applies just as cleanly to writing. I’d have a strong feeling for a piece, an article, an essay, occasionally something longer and more invented, and no handle at all on its shape. Plenty of conviction, no scaffold. A piece held up by conviction alone tends to wander, then stall, then join the pile of half-drafts.
What the questions do to a piece
So I started feeding writing projects in the same way I’d feed a product idea. The questions land differently on a piece of writing, but they do the same job. What’s the spine of this. Who’s it actually for. What’s the one thing a reader should leave with. What am I avoiding writing because it’s the hard part. That last one is uncomfortably effective. The thing I’m dancing around is almost always the actual piece.
It doesn’t write the prose, and I wouldn’t want it to. The words are the part I’m there for. What it does is hand me the skeleton before I start hanging sentences on it, so I’m not discovering at paragraph nine that I never knew what the piece was about.
Structure as a runway, not a cage
The fear with structure is that it flattens the thing, turns a piece with a pulse into a template. I haven’t found that. If anything it runs the other way. Knowing the shape frees me to play inside it, the way knowing the rules of a form, a sonnet, a tight three-act thing, gives you something to push against. A blank page is not freedom. A blank page is the most paralysing thing there is. A little scaffolding is what lets the actual creative part start.
It’s an odd use for a tool built to define products. But the underlying problem turned out to be the one I have everywhere. The idea is never the hard part. Giving it a shape it can stand up in is.