Write Against the Algorithm with a Structural Inventory
- Jul 5
- 2 min read
If you've ever spent twenty minutes scrolling Netflix without choosing anything, you've felt the quiet trap of personalization: a system that knows you so well it can only show you more of yourself.
Writers fall into the same trap, except the algorithm isn't running on a server somewhere. It's running in your head.
Every writer develops habits — of both process and perception. You reach for the same sentence structures. You default to the same emotional register. You resolve scenes the way you've always resolved scenes, because that's what has worked before, and the brain, ever efficient, files "what worked before" under "what will work again." Over time, your creative choices begin to look suspiciously like a Spotify playlist that's decided you only want indie folk forever.
The problem isn't that these patterns exist. The problem is that they become invisible. You write predictably. And you can't revise what you can't see.
A structural inventory can help.
Go through a draft and briefly note, for each distinct unit — a scene, a stanza, a section, a paragraph block — two things: what the emotional temperature is (tense, warm, melancholy, comic) and how it ends (resolved, interrupted, faded out, punched). Then look at the list as a whole. Most writers, when they do this for the first time, discover they've been composing in one key. Every unit ends on a quiet exhale, or every emotional peak gets undercut with irony, reflexively, as a kind of nervous tic.
The inventory makes the pattern visible in a way that reading straight through never does, because reading pulls you into each moment, while the list lets you see the shape of all the moments together. Once you can see the pattern, you can decide whether it's working or whether it's just what you do. Then find one unit that could stand to end differently, and try it: break the loop once, deliberately, and see what opens up.
More than merely fixing mistakes, revision puts you back in control so you can make deliberate choices. This is a terrific technique for finding those places you've outsourced to habit.
