How to Write Both Fast & Well, Part 5: An Ancient Lesson in Three Acts

Last time, I showed you how to give your writing some shape by using the Inverted Pyramid format. As I said, this shape works well for news, because the reader finds more important material closer to the top. This has a downside, though: the farther you go into the piece, the less interesting it's likely to be. So it doesn't work too well when you want to build interest, such as in a story or a blog post. To meet that challenge we can use another kind of shape, this one derived from ancient prin...