Should You Outline or Just Wing it?
For Academic Papers or Creative Writing, how do you organize, if at all?
By Miles White
When I teach academic writing the first thing I always teach and preach to my students is the importance of pre-writing, especially outlining techniques. I tell them they must have a title, followed by this elaborate outlining method that begins with a topic, then a writing web to brainstorm, then coming up with a thesis, then more writing web and brainstorming, then a research question followed by more brainstorming, then a thesis sentence, followed by more brainstorming and then a list of prioritized talking points that get organized into a working outline that will be made into a first draft. Of course, in my own writing I never use any of this stuff. It is god awful boring. Who writes like that?
But here is the thing. I have been writing for more than 25 years, and fairly consistently one way or another. I don’t have to think like that anymore and I can end up with something coherent pretty quickly. People learning how to write may need at least some idea about structure if only how to have a strong beginning, a solid middle and a good conclusion. Students tend to just sit down and start writing whatever comes to their mind whether it is opinion or fact, with very little focus or direction. Then they Google around for some piece of writing they think sounds remotely as if it might have something to do with what they just said. Do they read it? No. They just lift some quotes from it and stick them in the paper at strategic points as if they actually supported something they just wrote. If they hit a fallacy or point of incomprehension they naturally blow right through it and just keep going, even if they end up in a twenty-one car pileup of unexamined intellectual wreckage in the conclusion; and those are often the better students. The rest just explode on take-off, cutting and pasting from Wikipedia and leaving a flaming trail of plagiarism strewn along several pages and then give you a blank stare like, what? One of the things I know about students is that they are lazy scum of the earth who will do as much as possible to avoid working even if they end up doing more work than they would have done if they just did the work in the first place. Google is God’s Font of Holy Knowledge – if they found it online it must be true. Ditto Wikipedia. Do any of them bother to verify what they are reading through other sources? Of course not. They are scum.
But don’t we who are much older, wiser and experienced pretty much do the same thing? Perhaps, but most of us now know what works, at least for us. I never make outlines, which does not mean that I do not organize my writing. Once I hit upon a writing topic, I automatically begin organizing it in my head, which sounds like a load of crap, but it’s not. The first thing I do is I have a title in my head; this pretty much keeps me on track. The title helps keep me focused on the final destination, but I do not mind excursions along the way as long as I end back up on the main highway. If I need sources I know where to put in the signposts along the way that allow the reader to follow me. This is a technique for experienced travelers who do not mind getting lost and finding their way again. If you want to get to Arizona it helps to at least have the destination in your mind before you head off, otherwise you will end up in Mississippi and not know the difference. How I get there is another matter. If I don’t have to get there by Tuesday and do not mind getting lost and finding myself again, I follow whatever route seems most appropriate – the highway, back country roads or scenic routes – pondering the ride, knowing I will eventually get to Arizona a richer, better person. Students tend to end up in Mississippi and wonder why that is not OK.
Another thing I do is to prioritize things in my head, juggling ideas I know I want to bring in. By the time I sit down to write, ideas have been churning around for several hours, days or weeks. I know what the writing is about, pretty much how it should end, and how it should start. All I have to do is get out of the way and let it unravel itself, rewriting and revising as needed to focus, adjust and sharpen at the end. I think this is probably what most writers do, and I don’t think it has to be any more complicated than that regardless of the millions of trees sacrificed every year to the cottage industry for books about writing. Most writers just sit down and blow, as Allen Ginsburg once told me, just like a jazz musician who has mastered the basic rudiments of music and the song form. You don’t need to know what the solo is going to be before you actually play it. How boring would that be even if you could do it? But if you’re playing ‘I Got Rhythm’ changes, you need to at least know how the changes work and you need to be able to hear the melody and the form. Then you just need to have something to say.
