STEP 1: BRAINSTORM THE CHAPTERS FOR YOUR BOOK The first step in creating your outline is to brainstorm and figure out what the chapters are for your book. What is a chapter? It’s basically a single cohesive idea, fully explored. Depending on how you organized your book, it can be a step in the process, or one of several principles, or anything like that. Keep working your list of chapters—adding, subtracting, moving— until you have the major points you want to explain, in the basic order you want to explain them. Don’t worry too much about the order at this point, they will prob- ably change in the next step. All you want to do here is figure out exactly what your chapters are. Also, don’t spend too much time worrying about chapter titles. Just put something in, you can change it later. While there are numerous ways to brainstorm, here are the frame- works that we’ve found work best: FRAMEWORK 1: “WORKSHOP PRESENTATION” This framework works very well for people used to formally pre- senting their knowledge. Just imagine that you are giving a speech, presentation, or workshop to go over your material. What would be part 1? What would be part 2? How would you break up the days? Basically the structure of the workshop or presentation becomes the chapters of the book. FRAMEWORK 2: “TEACH YOUR BOOK” For this model, begin with your ideal reader, someone who is in your primary audience that you described in your positioning. Now, 96 · ThE SCriBE METhOD