The ideas you use for blog posts don’t stand there for all to see, like Miss California in a beauty contest. They are abstractions, which, like souls occupying bodies, are only revealed through the structure of the post they inhabit. Which comes first, the body or the soul, the structure or the idea?

I can’t answer either question, definitively. In the case of ideas and posts, sometimes I come up with an idea and then seek a structure to reveal it. But sometimes the structure so forms and informs the idea, that it can be said to come first. It depends. In writing this post I started with a simple idea, a typology of formulas for writing posts, which suggested a simple list structure. That structure led me to an idea that was more fun to write, and, I hope, more entertaining for you to read: I exemplify each formula in the very way I described it. This revised idea lead to a more complicated structure, and so it went, back and forth.