The Bricklayer's Spare Brick: On the Dangers of Too Much Structure

We are told, from the first moment we pick up a pen or open a blank document, to build a framework. Outline your chapters. Structure your argument. Map your narrative arc. This advice is so ubiquitous it has become the very mortar of the writing craft—the essential binder that holds a piece together and gives it shape. Without it, we’re told, we risk a collapse into incoherence.

But what if our reverence for the blueprint is, itself, causing a collapse of a different kind? What if the most vital, surprising, and human parts of a piece are smothered by the very structure meant to support them? The counterintuitive truth I’ve come to believe is this: the more perfect and complete your initial structure, the more likely you are to build a sterile edifice, impressive from the street but empty of life inside.

The Tyranny of the Filled Space

A meticulous outline creates an obligation. Each heading, each bullet point, becomes a cell that demands to be occupied. The creative act shifts from discovery to fulfillment, from exploration to checkbox completion. You are no longer listening for the faint, interesting voice of a tangential character or a half-formed idea that flits at the edge of your mind. You are too busy laying bricks exactly where the plan dictates, ensuring the wall is straight and the course is true. The ‘spare brick’—that unplanned idea, that rogue image, that emotional detour—has no place here. It is discarded as debris, clutter on the clean site of your plan.

This is how writing becomes formulaic, even when the formula is self-made. It explains why so many diligently outlined novels feel airless, why so many logically structured essays fail to spark. They followed the map so faithfully they never got lost, and therefore never found anything they weren’t already looking for. The magic, the pulse, the ‘link’ in a Link Pulse Feed, often emerges from the stumble, the glance sideways, the willingness to let a wall curve where the blueprint said it should run straight.

I am not advocating for pure chaos. Anarchy is not a productive method. Instead, I’m suggesting we view structure not as a rigid exoskeleton built in advance, but as a tentative internal skeleton that grows with the work. Start with a direction, a feeling, a handful of core ‘bricks.’ Then begin building. Let the weight and texture of the ideas themselves suggest the next course. Be willing to dismantle a section that feels dead, even if it was perfectly placed in the outline. Cherish the spare brick you didn’t know you needed.

The common advice promises efficiency and safety. It guards against the fear of the blank page by filling it with scaffolding. But true editorial craft isn’t just about assembling pre-approved parts; it’s about the sensitivity to recognize when the material is asking for a different shape altogether. It’s the bricklayer knowing that sometimes, the most important brick is the one left over—the one that proves the initial calculation was wrong, and that a more interesting, more living structure is possible. Build, by all means. But leave space for the wall to tell you how it wants to stand.

Notes & further reading

A few pages I came back to while writing this: