Outlining: an unnatural act
I am outlining.
My first conscious memory of outlining comes circa second or third grade. Assignment: research paper. Subject: THE SHIPS OF THE WORLD.
It was night, dark outside; I had my materials spread before me on the dining-room table, books big and small from the Wattles Elementary School library; and I was paralyzed. I'd pored through the books, looked at the pictures and picked my favorites, but I had no idea what to do with that knowledge, or what to do next, or how to do anything.
My mother approached. "Well," she said, "why don't you make an outline?" And then she explained what an outline was.
Later, I would scan images of Viking longboats into our Mac Plus, paste them into my short Word (1.0?) document, and then print it all out on a screeching ImageWriter. No one in my class had seen anything like it.