Attention can take you far.
But I have found that attention alone is not enough.

After spending time reflecting on how stories stay with me—how tone, voice, and small moments linger—I’ve moved into a different phase of the work. Editing at this stage has required more than just attentiveness. It has necessary structure.

Structure has a reputation for being restrictive. Mechanical. Scientific. But what I’ve discovered is that structure does not limit meaning—it reveals it. When a story is placed under even a simple framework, patterns emerge. Not imposed patterns, but existing ones that were easy to overlook while drafting.

Over the past week, I’ve been working chapter by chapter with a logic worksheet designed to track agency, decision-making, and consequence. It doesn’t ask how well a scene is written. It asks a more fundamental question: What actually happens here, and who makes it happen?

LOGIC WORKSHEET

This shift in focus has been instructive for me.

I have found that when you slow a story down to its essential actions—what a character wants, what they do, what choice they make, and what follows—you begin to see where momentum is real and where it is assumed. You see where a character is acting, and where events are simply occurring around them. You see where information is earned, and where it appears too conveniently.

None of this is about finding fault. It’s about clarity.

What structure makes visible is responsibility. Not moral responsibility, but narrative responsibility. Who carries the weight of the story forward? Who decides? Who pays the cost of those decisions? These questions are easy to answer intuitively while drafting. They are harder—and more honest—when written down.

What has surprised me most is how often the worksheet confirms my instincts rather than contradicts them. The chapters that felt solid tend to hold up under scrutiny. The ones that felt uneasy usually reveal why. Structure doesn’t argue with intuition; it gives it language.

There is also a humbleness in this process. A worksheet does not care about intention. It cares about the outcome. It doesn’t ask what I meant in a scene to do. It asks what the scene actually does. That distinction matters.

In many ways, this feels like the natural continuation of the attention I’ve always valued. First, you notice what stays. Then, you ask why it remains. Structure is simply the next level of noticing—one that replaces assumption with evidence.

I don’t experience this phase as narrowing the story. I experience it as sharpening it. The goal isn’t to make every chapter efficient or symmetrical. It’s to ensure that when something stays in the story, it does so for a reason.

Stories don’t persist because they are loose. They persist because they can withstand examination.

This week’s work has reminded me that meaning is not diminished by being tested. It’s clarified. And clarity, like attention, is something a story has to earn.