When you pull off the segueway to get back on track, your readers think it’s charming that you’ve managed to save the day. However, there is a problem with that strategy: When this happens, the temptation is to attempt a similar heroic segueway to get your readers where you want them to be. However, if you are not as brilliantly prepared as I was, you lose your reader and become unsure how to get them back on track. Now, since I knew in advance I would do that, I was able to pull you back to the original train of thought with a segueway. I intentionally took you down a different track of thought with the James Bond metaphor to demonstrate a point about how easy it is to deviate from your original train tracks. You know how sometimes train cars get broken up by dynamite and the front car goes one way and the back car goes another and all your hero can do is watch hopelessly as the front part zooms away without him? I just did that to you.Īnd the challenge is that unless I as a writer can figure out some way of connecting your train of thought back together, you’ll never find out where that front train car went. I know I would.īut when I take you off on a tangent, I have officially taken you off my train tracks and down another set that go somewhere else. Not that I’m sure you wouldn’t prefer thinking of James Bond. That made all of you start thinking about James Bond instead of trains of thought. As it stands, I forced you to take some time and think about James Bond as an entity unto himself and not just a metaphor. Bond to be a casual aside, then I could have hopped directly from that metaphor to the next topic. I threw James Bond in because he occurred to me while I was discussing what happens to a reader who is thrown off the train of thought. Now, obviously James Bond is not included in this outline. My outline for this particular blog post would look a little something like this:Įxplain the Reader’s Reaction to a Bad ToTĬreate Quantum Physics that Allows Outline to Refer to Itself It’s easy to go off on tangents and deviate from your original outline. Wait, what was I talking about? Oh, right, trains. I think the current one is doing a wonderful job, though, don’t you? Do not assume your readers are James Bond. But Bond is a very determined fellow and often does things beyond the ken of mortal men, like using bowler hats as viable weaponry. Once you’ve fallen off someone’s train because there was no railway car where you thought there was going to be one, you are not exactly inclined to hop back up on the train to see if you can follow the rest of the cars to their conclusion. If you have disconnects between your railway cars of thought, your reader falls off your train and that sucks for them. You need to figure out a way to link all your railway cars together so that it becomes one long, connected train of thought so you can walk from one end to the other. Think of each individual topic in your outline as a railway car. In general, I think of this as a train of thought, since the metaphor is so very apt. Now it’s time to learn how to use that outline to make a complete document that’s easy to follow. ![]() I’ve discussed that a good ebook needs an outline and how to write one. ![]() I’ve written about how to write a good ebook.
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