Studying Structure

Finding form and creating writing prompts with reverse outlining

Last week in our Writing Group, we had such a great conversation on structure. It got me thinking about the deeply subconscious nature of shapes, and how a large part of the work of writing or creating any artwork (or doing cultural analysis or writing criticism) is making ourselves more conscious of the shape of the everyday. This is the power of thinking intentionally about form— recognizing how what we create can reproduce or disrupt or alter the formal aspects of narrative and artistic tradition, which carry with them ideological implications.

Last week we discussed the reverse outline as a practical strategy for studying the structure of a text, and some of you asked that I provide an example of what that looks like, so I thought I’d do that here.