Dear Abmox,

I only offer my humble opinion about how to write a great article for two reasons - I’ve lived much longer than you ergo I’ve read and perhaps written more, and, because you asked.

Oh, how I’ve been in your position before. I’ve had great ideas for articles that fell through because I couldn’t provide a solid foundation for them on which to build. That is the key, my friend.  Any idea that you have for an article should be couched in its own architexture. Writing with a well-planned design is like having a solid foundation to support your story. Like a builder who would not first construct a roof without a frame to set it upon, a writer should not set down a story upon a page without making sure it’s stable via underpinnings of the firmest kind.

There are several architextural means by which to achieve your article’s ends. Here are a few foundation-builders that I learned through my own missteps, design flaws, and forgetting to build my balustrade before I added the railing:

Research: Proper research is like the vestibule of your article. To coax the reader in to the main story, they need to trust that you have done research on the subject. This applies to many types of articles such as fiction, science, paranormal, humor, history, film and television, steam punk, etc. Readers show up in your vestibule wanting to enter the main story but they need to trust you first and a happy reader is a returning reader, perhaps even a fan. And be grateful you don’t have to stand for hours at a card catalogue writing down call numbers to find what you need. Treat the world wide web as your great room and gather information that makes sense to you.

Point of View: When you erratically switch the point of view in your article, readers get confused. For example, if the Parthenon was built with Ionic, Doric and Corinthian columns in a random pattern, it would be marked as a mess instead of hailed as a triumph.

Even when crumbling, this magnificent structure retains its organized purpose by remaining solid in its original design. Don’t change the point of view of your story out of whimsy. If the article is narrated by you, a secondary character or an omniscient voice, retain your POV throughout. The less confusing to the reader, the better.

Structure: I’m not talking about grammar, spelling and punctuation here. Conventions can be studied and improved upon throughout a writer’s life. I’m talking about the nuances of the paragraph. The reader needs to be able to take a breath.  I’ve navigated away from so many possibly great stories because there was no structure to them. Paragraphs are the grand staircase of your article. Please lead your readers either up and down these steps in a nice, orderly fashion.

Characters: Every character has a back-story whether in fiction or non-fiction and I need to know and understand them so I can then care about the story. For example, Sue Grafton has spent years constructing Kinsey Millhone’s fictionalized life. Readers of Grafton’s much-loved detective series care about Millhone and what happens to her, as if she were real. Setting up a character also works with non-fiction. For example, what if Helen Keller’s biography started out with her learning about the meaning of water without first giving us the tumultuous details about Helen’s early life, sickness and tantrums before-hand? Would we have celebrated this lightbulb moment with Helen near as much if we didn’t know how far she had come? Your characters are like your arches on top of your proper foundation. They straddle the story line and have a beginning, an end and a significant purpose.

I hope that helps you, Abmox. If you think about the foundation as you lay down your article, then the bubble in your level will be spot-on.