Strategies for Organizing Your Ideas
Writers need strategies that make writing systematic but do not stifle inventiveness. For this reason, most writers begin drafting with some type of plan — a list, a scratch outline, or a detailed storyboard like that used by filmmakers. Outlines can be very helpful, but they must be tentative and flexible if writers are to benefit from writing’s natural recursiveness.
I began [Invisible Man] with a chart of the three-part division. It was a con- ceptual frame with most of the ideas and some of the incidents indicated.
— RALPH ELLISON
You are always going back and forth between the outline and the writing, bringing them closer together, or just throwing out the outline and making a new one. — ANNIE DILLARD