The Elements of Writing Outline

In my updated book The Elements of Writing, I offer simple, actionable techniques for storytelling, mechanics, and analysis.

You can get a sense of my system with this outline of The Elements of Writing. After listing the writing skill, I offer a case study showing how to apply the skill. Most of the case studies come from great literature, film, and journalism.

The Core Idea—The Golden Rule of Writing

  • Make Everything a Journey: Brent Staples’s “Black Men in Public Space’
  • Start Strong, Finish Strong: William Nack’s Secretariat
  • Take the Landscape View: Applying the Landscape View

Act I: Storytelling 

1. Narrative 

  • Give Your Story a Narrative Arc: Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood
  • For Complexity, Show More Than One Arc: Robert Caro’s The Passage of Power
  • Show Characters Hitting Brick Walls: Homer’s The Odyssey
  • Nest Journeys Inside Journeys: Andre Agassi’s Open

2. Characters

  • Compile Dossiers for Your Characters: Sherlock Holmes
  • Explore Characters’ Lives, Zone by Zone: Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being
  • Find Your Characters’ Throughlines: Heroes of the Civil Rights Movement
  • Use the Wheel of Archetypes: L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz (55
  • Spin the Wheel of Archetypes: Gregory Maguire’s Wicked

3. World of the Story

  • Create Small, Knowable Places: Emma Donaghue’s Room
  • Map the Character’s “Circles of Life”: Gay Talese’s ‘Frank Sinatra Has a Cold’
  • Use Place to Explain Character and Ideas: Robert Caro’s The Path To Power
  • Use Place to Explore Identity: Judith Ortiz Cofer’s Silent Dancing
  • Place Stories in a Larger World: Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep

4. Action and Scenes 

  • Depict Specific, Deliberate Actions: Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men 
  • Use Speech-Acts to Propel the Story: William Shakespeare’s Othello
  • Build Actions into Scenes: William Shakespeare’s Macbeth
  • Create a Mystery to Surprise the Reader: William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

5. Rhythm and Beats

  • Use beats to Move Stories Forward: Casablanca 
  • Use Beats For Descriptions: Fatima Mernissi’s Dreams of Trespass
  • Yo-Yo Scene and Summary:Elizabeth Gilbert’s ‘Lucky Jim’

6. Details

  • Find Details By Looking Inside-Out: Isabel Chenoweth’s ‘Hanging Out’
  • Isolate Details to Make Big Points: The New York Times ‘Portraits in Grief’
  • Use Status Details to Reveal Ego and Desire: Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full
  • Put Details into Action: Journalism fragments

Intermission: On Style

7. The Senses 

  • Help the Reader to Feel: Scott Russell Sanders’s ‘Under the Influence’
  • Help the Reader to See: Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi
  • Help the Reader to Hear: Varieties of Onomatopoeia

8. Wordplay 

  • Tap Into Life’s Everyday Rhythms: Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address
  • Use Metaphors and Similes to Orient and Disorient: Rick Reilly and Thomas Lunch
  • Riff by Playing with Words: Roy Blount Jr.’s Alphabet Juice
  • Remember that Good is Great: Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House

9. Numbers 

  • Use Ones to Highlight People, Places, and Issues: Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead
  • Use Twos to Establish Oppositions and Complements: The Yankees-Red Sox rivalry
  • Use Threes to Reveal Dynamic Relations: Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters
  • Use Lists to Show Complexity: Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried

Act II: Mechanics 

10. Sentences 

  • Follow the Golden Rule for Sentences: Coverage of national Crises
  • Give Every Sentence Clear Blasts: Ringo Starr and the Beatles
  • Create Revolver Sentences: Stephen Crane’s Red Badge of Courage
  • Make Some Sentences More Complicated: Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence 
  • Alternate Short and Long Sentences: Ernest Hemingway’s journalism

11. Words

  • Use Simple Words, Almost Always: John McPhee’s The Curve of Binding Energy and In Suspect Terrain
  • Use Longer Words as Precision Instruments: The American Sesquipdalian
  • Use Active Verbs, Even to Describe Passivity: Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken and Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov
  • Avoid the Verbs To Be and To Have: Using ‘to be’ and ‘to have’
  • Avoid Bureaucratese and Empty-Calorie Words: George Orwell’s ‘The Politics of the English Language’
  • Avoid Aggressive Adjectives and Adverbs: Tom Wolfe’s ‘The Girl of the Year’

12. Paragraphs

  • Make Every Paragraph an “Idea Bucket”: Journalism fragments
  • Follow the Golden Rule in Every Paragraph: James Van Tholen’s ‘Surprised by Death’
  • ‘Climb the Arc’ in Most Paragraphs: Martin Luther King’s ‘Mountaintop’ speech

13. Composition 

  • Make Every Piece a Journey: Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie
  • Find the Right Shape: The Bill Clinton story
  • Slot Your Paragraphs: Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Terrazzo Jungle”
  • Make Transitions Virginia Wolff’s ‘Ellen Terry’

Intermission: Technical Procedures

14. Grammar 

  • Make Sure the Parts of Speech Get Along: Approaches to the his/her problem
  • Use Punctuation to Direct Traffic: Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and Robert Caro’s The Passage of Power
  • Select the Right Word: William Safire’s ‘On Language’

15. Editing

  • Search and Destroy, From Big to Small: Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up 
  • Fix Problem Paragraphs With Tabloid Headlines: John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty
  • Edit by Reading Aloud and Backward: C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves
  • Murder Your Darlings: Raymond Carver’s ‘One More Thing’

Act III: Analysis 

16. Storytelling for Analysis

  • Narrate Complex Issues: Eugenie Ladner Birch’s ‘From Flames to Flowers’
  • Use Beats to Make Arguments: On the Electoral College System
  • Use Cliffhangers to Drive Analysis: Barry Bluestone’s ‘The Inequality Express’
  • Use the Senses in Arguments and Rhetoric: Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a Dream’ Oration
  • Allow Ideas To Unfold, One by One: ‘Falling Man’

17. Questions and Brainstorming

  • To Get Started, Spill Your Mind: Brainstorming nonviolence
  • Ask This-or-That and W Questions: Brian Lamb’s interviewing techniques
  • Always Ask: What Causes What?: What’s the ‘best’ form of government?

18. Framing 

  • Use Testimony of Experts and Others: The Debate Over Global Warming
  • Consider Hypotheticals and Scenarios: Social contract theorists
  • Find a Super Model to Guide Analysis: Super models of social science

19. Making a Case

  • Climb the “Ladder of Abstraction”: Garrison Keillor’s Lena and Ole Joke
  • Identify and Operationalize Variables: The causes of fatigue
  • Crunch the Numbers: Edward Glaeser on Urban Vitality
  • Play the Game of Halves: Exploring the causes of war