When I was in the eighth grade or so, we read a short story by Jack London called “To Build A Fire” about a dude freezing to death in Alaska. While my circumstances are not quite as dire, I too have had to learn some things about building a fire.

Fire needs fuel, air, and heat. Reduce any of these three sufficiently and you’ll kill your fire. So we always have to make sure the fire will have plenty for the first two ingredients, and have ample chance to generate the third. If the fuel’s wet, it takes more heat to dry it out than a small fire can generate, and it will die. If the wood is dry but too packed together, the air can’t get to get to the flame and it will die. If the pieces are too far apart and the flame gets chilled, it will die.

Since small pieces take less heat to ignite, we start with small pieces. (I usually use about three.) These will light larger pieces, which will burn long enough to ignite big pieces of wood, and then—as long as you supply the three ingredients—your fire will burn indefinitely. It doesn’t take much to start a fire; just plenty of air and a little dry wood.

The first thing to do for a successful fire is to build your house with the chimney inside the house and give it as vertical a rise as possible. If not, you’ll always be fighting physics.

Let’s assume your house is already built. The next thing is to open the damper so the fire has air. Our stove (a Lopi Endeavor, but that’s not me in the picture) also has a smoke valve thingy to help with fire starting (I never use mine). If your fire struggles to start and you have one of these extra valves, you may want to open it to see if that helps.

For fuel, I like to give the fire a good, solid wall to snuggle up against—a larger split piece of wood that will lean over the flame. I angle this piece in the stove and wedge it up against the firebrick to keep it from moving.

Then I give it a friend on the left side. The two form a “V”. If you were a fire in the middle of the V, wouldn’t you feel cozy in there?

Then a sheet of Wall Street Journal (it’s big, lightweight, and doesn’t have much color ink) gets rolled up and stuffed in the V, not too tightly. I toss on two or three pieces of kindling; dry bark works nicely. The split piece shown here came from a short end of log I cut last summer. I pop those short pieces in half or quarters and let ‘em dry all summer; in the winter I break the dried pieces into kindling with a hatchet and they work handsomely.

I like to slide a skinnier split piece on top of the V to keep the heat together. Note how I’ve left plenty of gap here to let the air in freely. Also, as the newspaper burns down the kindling will settle, giving even more space for air to flow in.

Now apply fire and close the door.

I usually don’t have to do anything else at this point. The chimney’s strong draft will pull the fire along until it’s running on its own. Then I close the damper down for a steady burn. I have a weakness for watching fire, and sometimes as I gaze dreamily at the rolling yellow flames I’ll see where a piece of wood may need to be scootched over or another one added. Usually though, five minutes after I’ve first opened the damper I can be in the other room, getting ready to go out for my morning run.

Following these steps, a 12” galvanized bucket o’kindling will take me several weeks to go through, and I try to use not more than six matches a week—less than one a day. That’s because I’m a cheapskate and don’t like to waste anything.