In 1940, engineers in Washington state built a bridge from Takoma to the Kitsap Peninsula. It was the third-largest suspension bridge in the world, at the time.
Unfortunately, it only lasted four months.
The construction workers who built the bridge, nicknamed her “Galloping Gertie” because she looked like a bucking bronco whenever there was wind. Turned out, the bridge lacked proper girders, which caused it to rock and sway under strong winds. Just four months in, she was hit with 40-mile per hour winds and collapsed.
Luckily, when writers do not embed their writing with structure, the worst that happens is boring or losing a reader. But even that kind of failure can be avoided.
Last week, I shared how your ideas can collapse like a soufflé when the core structure isn’t there.
Today, I want to talk about timing—because there’s something even trickier about structure that most people don’t realize: you can’t just “add it in later.” Not easily, anyway.
Think about baking: If you realize halfway through mixing you forgot to measure your flour, there’s no easy fix. Sure, you could try sprinkling in a bit more or adding extra eggs to balance it out… but by then, you’re guessing. And guessing in baking rarely ends well.
Even adding a missing ingredient out of order can affect the chemistry of the bake—and all baking is chemistry. Tasty, but still science.
Baking ratios only work if you set them before you mix the batter.
Writing works much the same way.
Once you’ve poured all your ideas onto the page without a plan, “fixing” the structure means pulling apart sentences, shuffling entire sections, and sometimes scrapping huge chunks of work. It’s like trying to fish out extra sugar after you’ve already dumped it into the bowl—messy, time-consuming, and frustrating. And it never quite turns out right in the end. There’s always a funky taste left behind.
This is why professional writers (and bakers) start with a plan. They know what the finished product should be, and they set the backbone before they begin. For writers, that backbone isn’t flour or eggs—it’s the throughline, the logic flow, and the natural pacing.
When you account for those elements first, your draft holds together. You can still play with flavors (your voice, your stories, your examples), but you’re not constantly stopping to wonder, “Where is this even going?”
And, just like it’s faster to measure your ingredients before you bake, it’s faster to set up structure before you write. You spend less time in revision mode, and more time polishing a piece that actually works.
Yes, I know there are those of you who like to jump in with words and no plan. And that can work on a small scale—writing a scene or short story to use somewhere. But it doesn’t work on the large scale—presentations, scripts, speeches, blogs, articles, books, etc. Those require structure.
And that’s exactly what I teach in my new course, From Weak to Wow: Strengthen Your Copy & Content with Structure. It’s the writer’s equivalent of a pro baker’s book of ratios—easy to learn, endlessly adaptable, and impossible to skip if you want results that rise or bridges to stand.