Outline Workshop

Mon, Nov 06

Outlining, idea mapping, storyboarding -- however you do it, the basic idea is to think structurally about what you want to say and how to say it. This can mean crafting a traditional outline where you put

1. The Main Idea Here
   1. and then list
   2. subsequent ideas
      1. and possible digressions
      2. or counterdigressions
2. And Major Turns
   1. one after another
   2. and back again
3. Until the End.

But it can also mean making a narrative in classic "Three-Act Structure," "Five-Act Structure," or Joseph Campbell's concept of the monomyth as adapted by Dan Harmon into the "Story Circle," trying to build something more complicated like a "Braided Essay," a lecture on nothing, a spiral, a walk, or an explosion (with a hat tip to Jane Alison), or even adapting musical forms like jazz, the symphony, or hip hop.

Structure means patterning: how you use difference and repetition across scales, from diction and sentence structure to paragraphing and sectioning to plot and broad organization. There are natural patterns we can learn from and adopt. There are traditional patterns we can use or reject or repurpose. We can also make our own.

The important thing is to think about the structure and pattern of your work as a whole.

• How do you shape the holistic experience of the reader through patterning in language?
• Are your major sections all of the same size or of different sizes? Why?
• Do your sections move in a line, a spiral, radiating vectors, digressions, loops, or do they not move at all?
• Do your sections change in time? Intensity? Tone?   
• Does your structure change as you go? Does your piece shift from a spiral to a branch to an explosion?
• Where does the reader begin? Where does the reader end? How do they move from one to the other?