My daughter was telling me about a story she’s writing. The other day she wrote 1,000 words; she had even written an outline. “An outline!” I said. “That’s unusual.” She and I are not, shall we say, planners. I praised her for doing something she doesn’t usually do.
And then I did a thing that parents often do: I opened up a Socratic dialogue. “Outlines can feel a little rigid, right?” I said. “On the one hand, they give you structure. On the other hand, they might constrain you.”
She wisely had no use for this line of thought. “No no no, it’s not like that,” she said. “An outline is like a stake in a garden, and your little pea plant grows around it organically.”
I spent three years in an MFA program for creative writing, righteously dismissing the idea of outlining a story. If I had had one professor who described the value of outlining the way my daughter did, I would’ve become a better writer. Lesson learned.