Disposition - The Skeleton of Your Story

#In Denmark we use the word Disposition, which in English seldom used means the arrangement of things. The Dispositions shows the arrangement of elements in your story.

1. Childhood memories
2. How I use disposition - the outline - today
3. Why I think I must use a disposition - an outline - in future work
4. What should a disposition - an outline - provide to my idea
5. Discussion
6. How my idea to this article came in to my mind
7. Why is it an good idea to use a dispostion - an outline

When I was in school, we naturally had to write essays. At some point, more structure had to be introduced into our writing so that our essays weren’t just stories about vacations or whatever theme the teacher had chosen.

We were introduced to the disposition - the outline – the skeleton of the written piece, a timeline running through your work, at least in broad strokes. There are undoubtedly more modern tools for creating the framework and overview of your text.

We were tasked with working on an outline and creating an overview of what we wanted to write. The outline had to be written at the beginning of the essay as a kind of table of contents. And woe to the poor soul who didn’t follow their outline.

I’ve tried several times to make an outline for some of the larger articles I’ve written. One turned out to be quite successful and ended up boosting my article on Medium.com. Another completely flopped because the structure became too automated, and I felt it looked like something AI-generated. It wasn’t, but my readers didn’t want to read it.

Since then, I haven’t really worked with outlines in my writing.

Deep down, I have a desire to start writing something larger than the usual short stories I often write when I’m not writing poetry. Deep down, I have a wish to dive into writing a novel, and for that, I need to create a skeleton – a structure for how the story will rise from its feet and run up the legs, gather in the pelvis, be tossed around in the belly and spiced with kidneys and heart, aired in the lungs, and finally come together in the throat, standing as a clear message in the skull – preferably in the reader’s skull, too.

The outline should provide structure and help maintain an overview of the issues and analysis methods used to answer the problems, culminating in a concluding ending.

Every written work starts with an idea – something you want to share or know a lot about.

That’s at least the rough version of an outline. I’m quite sure it works best for a scientific article, where people interested in the topic can quickly look up which data has been collected, how, and which scientific approach has been used for the analysis, making the conclusion easier to understand.

It feels rigid and unusable in a short story or a novel. However, it’s necessary to have a skeleton for writing longer pieces. It's more likely to be called a storyline – which, at its core, is still an outline. Words and concepts change and modernize.

Today, my idea came from a prompt to write a title that starts with the letter "D." And then, I had free rein.

As I was out walking the dog, I thought about it and remembered the subjects we had in school many years ago, and suddenly essay writing and outlines popped into my head.

All the time we spent in school creating outlines for Danish essays. I think the biggest problem was that we had no idea what they were for in our future. Back then, there wasn’t much focus on being future-oriented in the way I hope today’s youth are being influenced.

Just like an outline for a written piece, it’s important to have a plan for learning work that extends far into the future. We just weren’t as critical or questioning back when I was in school.

I’ve written many assignments throughout my education and university studies. We didn’t call them outlines; instead, we were presented with how a scientific thesis should be structured, with a problem statement, data collection, analysis, conclusion, and so on. But it was essentially a form of outline.

An outline ensures you include everything you want to. I think of it a bit like mind maps of the content. The outline should also help create progress in your work, whether it's literature or a scientific article. If there’s no cohesion or progress in the story, the result will surely be poor.

That’s why I think, going forward, I’ll grab a piece of paper and write my outline for longer texts – whether they are articles, short stories, or my future novel.

For the record, I didn’t write an outline for this article. The numbered list in the beginning was created after I wrote the article. Could I have arranged the progress in my article in another way? I should be happy to hear your suggestions in the comments.