"I would rather read a poorly structured story that has fresh ideas than a tightly structured one with cliches"
About this Quote
Better a crooked road to somewhere new than a perfectly paved highway to the same old tourist trap. Douglas Wood is staking out a quietly radical preference in a culture that often confuses polish with value: give me risk, give me surprise, give me the nerve to be weird, even if the scaffolding wobbles.
The intent is almost craft advice, but it’s also a vote on what we reward. “Poorly structured” is a strategic provocation. Structure is the thing workshops can teach, the thing editors can fix, the thing AI can mimic. “Fresh ideas” are harder to manufacture on command; they require a mind that’s actually looking at the world instead of recycling story furniture. Wood is arguing that originality is the scarce resource, not competence. He’s also reminding readers that messiness can be a symptom of experimentation, not failure.
The subtext takes aim at the prestige economy of writing: the way “tight structure” gets treated as moral proof of seriousness, while imagination is dismissed as undisciplined. There’s a generational undertone, too: the late-20th-century shift toward programmatic storytelling, beat sheets, and market-tested arcs. In that context, Wood’s line reads like a defense of the shaggy draft, the story that hasn’t learned to behave yet.
It works because it flips the usual hierarchy. Instead of asking writers to earn creativity by first mastering rules, it suggests the opposite: rules matter, but they’re secondary to having something alive to say. The real jab is that cliches are the more unforgivable mistake. A flawed story can be revised; a stale one is dead on arrival.
The intent is almost craft advice, but it’s also a vote on what we reward. “Poorly structured” is a strategic provocation. Structure is the thing workshops can teach, the thing editors can fix, the thing AI can mimic. “Fresh ideas” are harder to manufacture on command; they require a mind that’s actually looking at the world instead of recycling story furniture. Wood is arguing that originality is the scarce resource, not competence. He’s also reminding readers that messiness can be a symptom of experimentation, not failure.
The subtext takes aim at the prestige economy of writing: the way “tight structure” gets treated as moral proof of seriousness, while imagination is dismissed as undisciplined. There’s a generational undertone, too: the late-20th-century shift toward programmatic storytelling, beat sheets, and market-tested arcs. In that context, Wood’s line reads like a defense of the shaggy draft, the story that hasn’t learned to behave yet.
It works because it flips the usual hierarchy. Instead of asking writers to earn creativity by first mastering rules, it suggests the opposite: rules matter, but they’re secondary to having something alive to say. The real jab is that cliches are the more unforgivable mistake. A flawed story can be revised; a stale one is dead on arrival.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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