FIRST, MAKE A MAP

You can learn to write powerfully by reading Machiavelli.

When we read The Prince there is a sense of moving forward step by step, with determination and direction. The technique you could use right now is this: clearly divide the topics of your ideas.

The topic that you want to expose is undoubtedly made up of several sub-topics. It doesn’t matter if there are two or three, or eight or fourteen. If you separate them and refer to each one in order, the reader will feel that with you they are on a well-paved, well-illuminated and straight path.

If you have reflected on the sub-themes of your themes, then the reader can very quickly follow the path that you want him to follow and that leads him exactly to learn what you wanted to teach.

Think of your reader as someone who gets on the Subway. He is in a hurry. He is inside a kind of labyrinth: he can take many paths but only one takes him where you want to take him. It is very easy to get sidetracked. The crowd next to him can make him lose his way.

Add this difficulty: a person in the Metro can ask another. Your reader can’t ask anyone. He has no one but you, the writer, to get to where you are leading him. If he doesn’t arrive, most of the blame lies with the one who designed the path and the directions for moving within that path.

If you, before writing, have drawn a map like the Metro for your text, then you can give it to the reader so that he never gets lost.

Reading the Prince gives the sensation of advancing without hesitation and without obstacles within the Metro of a big city as if we had always moved within it.

Watch the first chapter of The Prince:

“All the States, all the domains that have exercised and exercise sovereignty over men, have been and are republics or principalities. Principalities are hereditary or new. The new ones are either completely new, as Milan was under Francisco Sforza, or they are like added members to the hereditary State, as the Kingdom of Naples is for the King of Spain. The domains thus acquired are accustomed to live under a prince or to be free; and they are acquired by one’s own weapons or those of others, or by luck or by virtue”.

The reader cannot get lost with this map which is where it should be: exactly at the beginning of the trip.

Begins, then, by drawing the map of your ideas, and put it at the entrance of your text, without confusion or ambiguity.