Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Almost anyone can gather the material. Organizing it or creating a story from it, however, appears to be a rare yet valuable skill.

We have lots of information. Go to Wikipedia. Download PDFs of the pages. Concatenate the pages. There it is.

Go to a search engine. Find a dozen hits. Copy and paste. There it is.

Simple. Right? Everyone will read it. Right?

Wrong.

Someone needs to arrange or organize the material into a sequence that leads the reader somewhere. Some call that a “story.” Some call that a “flow.” Whatever we call it, we know it when we see it because it moves us.

Some persons do this well. Most others don’t. Natural-born talent? Maybe for 1% of us. The rest of us have to try hard(er). Let’s get to it.