3.1 Facing the Blank Set of Topics

Use one scaffold to create another.

Chapter 2 introduced a scaffold designed to avoid a key challenge: facing the blank page. The scaffold begins when you generate ‘seeds’ from which your outline grows (Section 2.6). Each seed provides a topic, written on its own index card to move topics from inside your mind to your world outside. Inspired by embodied cognition, writing becomes externalized thinking; you think by manipulating your index cards to develop a desired narrative.

The scaffold requires you to create seed topics from scratch in Step 1 (Section 2.6). Where do your seed topics come from? If creating seed topics forces you to face the blank page, then the scaffold’s goal is not achieved.

Chapter 3 provides different approaches to creating broad topics when you begin to create your scaffold. Each approach provides another scaffold for generating broad topics when your writing project begins. In short, Chapter 3 introduces additional scaffolds to help you create the scaffold described in Chapter 2.

All the scaffolds I describe in Chapter 3 treat creating topics as answering basic questions. I view the methods as scaffolds because I provide you with the basic questions in advance. The scaffolds differ from one another by using different sources for the questions. Chapter 3 describes seven different scaffolds to help you generate broad topics to launch your outline. I begin by showing how a discipline’s conventions often provide basic questions you can use to launch your outline’s scaffold.