3.8 Multiple Scaffolds For Writing

How else can your world help your writing?

Writing is challenging. Chapter 1 argued we make writing challenging by believing the myth of inspiration: we wait for fully formed sentences to arise in our mind. If writing does not depend upon inspiration, believing the myth of inspiration makes writing more difficult.

Chapter 2 illustrated how embodied cognition can help us to abandon the myth of inspiration, making your writing easier. When using the Chapter 2 method, you use index cards to display your thoughts on a surface in your world. You need not remember your thoughts, because you can see them on display. Thinking about your ideas becomes manipulating the index cards in your display. However, to use the method you must start by generating broad topics which leads, again, to the myth of inspiration. Where do your topics come from?

Chapter 3 used embodied cognition to provide an answer: it describes several scaffolds to help generate your initial topics. The scaffolds provide questions whose answers become topics for your outline. The scaffolds offered in Chapter 3 also move beyond this being a ‘book about using index cards to outline’. In Chapter 3 the prompt questions are the scaffold. While they could be placed on index cards, but they could just as easily be used by being read from the book. Furthermore, if you choose to move a set of prompt questions to index cards, then you will use the cards differently than is the case in the Chapter 2 method.

By providing additional scaffolds to launch topic creation for your outline’s scaffold, Chapter 3 shows you can use one scaffold to help create another, indicating many different scaffolds for writing exist. Chapter 4 explores additional scaffolds to support creating your first draft, revising and polishing your manuscript, and dealing with suggestions from editors and reviewers.