Robin Sloan

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.