Dear Hanne,
I know I want to write this book. What I don’t know is how to write something so big. I’ve written lots of short stuff. My job requires it, in fact, I write short pieces every week at least, sometimes several of them. My ability to write isn’t in question. My ability to write consistently isn’t the problem. The problem is that I look at something the size of a book and I freeze because honestly, it’s so big, and its impact is on this much larger and longer scale, not the short pieces I’m used to writing that go directly to their audience very soon after they’re written. So how do I move from writing short good things to writing long good things? What needs to change?
Desperately Seeking Longform
Allow me to introduce you to what I call Aqueduct Theory. You might already know what an aqueduct is, but in case some readers aren’t terribly familiar, an aqueduct is a structure that’s built to channel water from one place to another. Imagine building a river that started exactly where you wanted it to start and went exactly where you wanted it to go—let’s say to a place were fresh water wasn’t easily available—and you could even make your river take a particular route you chose along the way. That’s an aqueduct.
As you can imagine, the aqueduct is a very useful technology. The Romans built a lot of them. Some of the ones they built are still in use.
Understanding what an aqueduct has to do with writing requires that we think about two major questions. First: what are the problems an aqueduct has to solve in order to do its job? Second: what are some things that can help an aqueduct do that job?
The problems are many, but essentially boil down to these things:
Water only flows downhill, not up.
Water goes where gravity and opportunity take it: if the channel gets leaky, you will lose water to the leaks. Remember that the goal is to get the water from one chosen location to another.
Water is a liquid, not a solid, so it must be contained and channeled in order to be moved. If it isn’t, it just spreads out rather than moving forward. We want forward motion.
Water evaporates where its surface touches the air. Minimizing its surface area minimizes the amount that evaporates. We don’t want to lose water. We want to move it.
The phenomena that can help an aqueduct work are also also numerous, but the most important are probably these:
Gravity is known, dependable, reliable, and you can include it in your design.
Some building materials, like stone, are relatively water-resistant or watertight by nature. Some building techniques, like building channels from mortared blocks of stone, tend to be more water-tight than others like, say, building walls out of mud.
Creating channels whose walls are deep enough helps channel the water toward its destination and also reduces the surface area prone to evaporation.
An aqueduct moves water from one place to another via a chosen route. A book moves information from one place (inside the author’s head) to others via a chosen route. Many of the same problems and principles apply.
For example, water flows with gravity. But gravity is a known factor and you can include it in your design.
Many now-famous aqueducts are effectively bridges. The water channels are held up in the air to artificially smooth out the slopes in a place — say a mountain valley — that naturally provides both a downhill slope (easy!) and an uphill slope (very hard to get water to go up). You can design a route that uses gravity to get the water across the valley, but following the contours of the land below isn’t the way to get it done.
Using logic and design, you craft a way to move water that takes advantage of the reliability of gravity’s effects on water by essentially evening it out. The aqueduct that leaves one side of the valley needs to be just slightly higher than the point where it meets the land on the other side for the water to still flow downhill.
(Note: There are ways to move water up instead of having it flow down, like siphons and water screws. The Romans used them sometimes and they have their analogues in structuring books. But water is heavy and takes a lot of energy and effort to move, which makes these methods costly in labor, materials, or money. Letting gravity do the work is, and always has been, the easiest and least costly way.)
Information has logical flow too. One begins with background information and then adds detail, subtlety, and difference. An example of this is when we start with a problem, define the variables of the problem, and then work through the variables toward ways to solve the problem.
Similarly, water is a liquid that goes where gravity and opportunity take it. If the water isn’t channeled it spreads out and is no longer moving where you want it to go. If the channel gets leaky, you lose water en route. But chances for loss can be reduced by channeling and by reducing opportunities for leaks.
Information likes to leak and spread too. Everything is connected to everything else, if you look at it hard enough and are really trying to understand its nature. It’s rewarding to follow all those lateral connections: because where things are connected to other things they are relevant to those other things, and we love relevance. But spend too much time showing those connections, and the reader starts to forget why your original topic is relevant. The channel has disappeared. The information is just spreading every which way, and not traveling to a destination any more.
Again, logic and design come to the rescue. We craft channels to contain our information, and we build them with the least opportunity for leaks.
For example, we might use time as a way to channel information. If we begin at one point in time and then proceed through time to an endpoint, we have a channel through which information can be conveyed: we begin with the information about the earliest time point and, as the chronology progresses, we add the information that appears as time unfolds. This is usually how we tell stories, since stories usually take place over time. Over time—the chronology that is being written about and the time it takes to read it—enough information gets moved from writer to audience that the audience’s need for information is satsified.
We might also use subject as a way to channel information. If we’re writing a book about aqueducts, we might have a chapter on the purpose and uses of aqueducts, then a chapter about building materials that have been used for aqueducts, then one about using architecture and building structures to smooth out the landscape so water can continually flow downhill. Again, over time and through reading successively about different well-defined aspects of the subject, enough information gets moved from writer to audience that their reservoir of “information about aqueducts” is replete.
So you’re going to build an aqueduct (book). You’re going to move water (information) from one place to another.
You’re going to use logic to do it, because just as we know that water only flows downhill, we also know that people assimilate information best according to a particular pattern (from more basic to more detailed).
You’re going to build channels for the water to run through, because just as water will spread out and stop traveling (become a puddle, sink into the ground, evaporate) unless it’s channeled, information that isn’t channeled and has no boundaries will become diffuse and stop moving the reader’s understanding forward.
You’re going to build some architecture to smooth out the landscape so that you’re never trying to make water flow uphill. This often feels very artificial because it is: those vaulted bridges that carry aqueducts across mountain valleys did not exactly grow there.
But those vaulted aqueducts have a few other lessons for us too: that just because a structure is artificial doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a purpose, isn’t durable, or can’t be beautiful. After centuries, some of these aqueducts still carry water and others continue to be used as bridges, and people come from around the world to marvel at them.
Choose your starting point. Identify the stuff you want to move from one place to the other. Figure out where you want it to go and why there. Build channels for it to flow through, and give them the architecture that preserves just enough of a downhill slope that gravity will keep it flowing. Be mindful of the potential for leaks and reduce them as much as you can. Don’t worry about the architecture being artificial (of course it is!) worry about it being purposeful and strong enough to do its job.
If it was good enough for the Romans, it’s good enough for me and you.
— Hanne Blank Boyd
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