The start of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Proud Mary is one of those rather iconic bursts, instantly recognisable when you hear it.

It’s there because when writing that CCR album, John Fogerty was listening to a lot of Beethoven. Fogerty was impressed with the opening of the Fifth Symphony.

Even if it’s not obviously an adventure, fiction story elements are there to keep the reader captivated and turning the page in any genre.

Structure is essential to guiding your reader through your story. It’s giving information when it is needed. It’s shaping perspective on the events in the book. Structure is the scaffolding that holds up other elements of writing. It also gives you plenty of room to play. When you’re struggling with how things happen in the story, in the order they happen, take a look at what theme and value you are bringing to these events.

Deus ex machina. It’s a device we’ve all heard about from Ancient Greek theatre where a god was delivered by a machine, sometimes quite literally, to solve the problems of the players on stage. The famous example is when Medea needed to escape, the sun god Helios sends a chariot to save her. It wasn’t part of a subplot. It wasn’t something that grew out of lack of ideas. It was a device to bring a conclusion t a difficult position of the characters… and the playwright.

Even thousands of years ago, it wasn’t without its detractors.

Writing seems straight forward. One word, then another to finish a sentence. Repeat while building on ideas. We’ve been writing since we were children. It’s just much more words for a book.

But when you rush into it too fast you will fail to put all the pieces together.

Collaborating with a professional ghostwriter is not just about word count. There are other values a ghostwriter brings to the partnership. Ideas. Narrative structure. A way to recognise elements for your story that you might have overlooked.

Riddles require you to make up the context of the scene and find what fits. Stories build that piece by piece. There’s no cathartic emotional revelation in having the context given like this. There’s no story. There’s no value placed on this information. There’s no tension other than trying to solve the riddle. Stories require that the information we need – hopefully – comes right when we need it in order to make sense of what has happened.

Scenes and events don’t have a meaning on their own. It’s the context of a story that gives these events any significance.

The difficult part in writing is in building the foundations earlier so the emotional resonance speaks through these scenes.

When it’s looked at from a distance we can try to make a narrative out of it but they’re numbers, just statistics. Every half-time break in sports we witness talking heads trying to make sense out of statistics in order to give us a story of the game – some better than others.

These numbers don’t have meaning. But stories do.

There was a point while he was writing Fight Club where Chuck Palahniuk came to realise that the two characters – the narrator and Tyler – were the same. It wasn’t a twist he’d thought of before writing. It wasn’t a gimmick to string the reader along. He was writing a damning commentary on masculinity as he saw it in the mid-1990s.