3.1 CrEATE yOUr BOOk OUTliNE “The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.” —edwin SChloSSberg Your outline is the structure of your book, and thus incredibly important. If you start writing without a structure, the process will take forever, and the product will be haphazard and incomplete. Worse, having no outline often leads to not finishing your book at all. The outline is also your best defense against fear, anxiety, pro- crastination, and writer’s block. With good positioning and a good outline, the actual writing of the book becomes fairly easy. What I am about to teach is not what you learned about outlining in school. It is a somewhat unconventional way to approach it. But it’s the process we developed at Scribe to give our authors the best chance of actually getting their book done. What makes our outline different is we only intend it to trigger the proper ideas and concepts for each chapter, so when you sit down to write, you know what to focus on. CrEATE yOUr BOOk OUTliNE · 95