How Structure Transforms Our Ideas
Back at the end of the last century, when I learned “how to write” in high school, a critical step was creating an outline. I learned how to organize my argument using supporting evidence and bookend that argument with an introduction and conclusion that neatly summarized it. I learned how to use Roman numerals, letters, and numbers to delineate between main points and smaller details.
Later, I learned that this formalistic approach to outlining was much more didactic than necessary. By teaching students to outline formally, teachers taught students how to structure their writing.
I don’t outline the way I was taught anymore. I don’t often structure arguments the way I was taught, either. But outlines and structure are still critical to my writing process.
In the 1900s (as the kids say), my teachers expected simple, linear reports. I’m glad I learned that process. Later, I realized that most things I wanted to say weren’t simple or linear. After all, life is neither simple nor linear.
My process evolved as my thinking evolved—and vice versa. And that’s what I want to talk about today: the way structure can help us turn a collection of thoughts into something far more valuable than the sum of its parts.
So many thoughts and no time to think
Recently, a client wanted to talk through their challenges with digging into a big writing project. Big writing projects are daunting—especially when you’re trying to squeeze a career’s worth of insight into something readable and compelling. Where do you start? How do you decide what to include and what to exclude? What do you do with the firehose of ideas threatening to drown out the point you really want to make?
“Have we talked about when I make an outline?” I asked my client. We hadn’t, or at least not as part of a conversation about process. I generally don’t outline before I start writing. I outline after I’ve written enough to know what I really want to say.
Outlining isn’t something I use as pre-writing. Unlike what I was taught in high school, outlining is part of my editing process. For me, an outline is an intervention that organizes the mess of my initial writing. Writing is how I think, and outlining is how I organize those thoughts.
I don’t think every writer or media maker should outline in the middle of a project. But I think more writers and media makers do outline in the middle of a project than they would realize if asked directly. Like I said, writing is how I think—but lots of other people think verbally, through diagramming, or in movement. That thinking, whatever form it takes, is what I happen to call writing.
Recently, I told my husband, “I have so many thoughts, but no time to think them.” I meant that I know my brain is making connections and analyzing patterns—but I haven’t had space in my schedule to just write shit down and discover what my brain is doing behind my back. And it’s not until I do that that I’ll have the raw material I need to organize it into an outline, which I can turn into a coherent analysis or argument.
Structure turns thoughts into ideas. Whether we call it an outline or a story or a position or an argument, whether it’s formal or informal, time-tested or novel, constructed or intuited, structure is often a key component of clear communication. It helps our ideas spread and sustain.
Tsunami of information
Our contemporary communication and media ecosystems are relatively hostile to structure today. Not explicitly, of course. But as a result of how those systems function. Information overabundance and always-on streams make it difficult to attend to ideas long enough to grok the structure of a larger narrative. We may have lots of thoughts, but we have no time to think them.
In The Crisis of Narration, Byung-Chul Han argues that because we live amidst an excess of information, stories, and messages, we've lost our ability to narrate. Narration is a form of structure.
For Han, narration is how we construct meaning across time—how experience is passed and built on from community to community and person to person. It’s a story arc of meaning-making and sense-making. We narrate our lives when we turn disparate events into stories that shape who we know ourselves to be and how we fit into the past, present, and future. As Han sees it, we're rapidly losing the ability to narrate, thanks to the tsunami of information we drown in daily.
“Bits of information are like specks of dust, not seeds of grain," writes Han. Specks of dust are something to be brushed away, removed from whatever surface they're gathering on. But seeds of grain are storehouses of future plants, future food.
Most of the information—the headlines, content, data, etc.—we encounter daily is mere dust. It floats into our perception for a moment before it's swept away on the breeze or wiped up with a microfiber cloth. We may feel informed by this information, but we don't feel satisfied by it.
Something similar happens in our own minds. We want to communicate our observations, expertise, or hard-won experience. We want to argue for a position or teach what we know. But our knowledge likely exists more as bits of information—specks of dust rather than seeds. We can talk at length about subjects we care deeply about. But we freeze when it comes to creating a course, writing an op-ed, producing a podcast series, or authoring a book—forms that depend on structure to be satisfying and compelling.
Even if we’re regularly hitting the publish button on Instagram, YouTube, a podcast feed, or TikTok, we may still feel unsatisfied by what we create. While making TikTok videos or podcast episodes or articles can be quite fun, at some point, we realize that we've accumulated a thick layer of dust without sowing any seeds for future harvest.
The tsunami of information means that our perceptual apparatus is permanently stimulated. It can no longer enter into contemplation. The tsunami of information fragments our attention. It prevents the contemplative lingering that is essential to narrating and careful listening.
Han uses the example of how we've learned to document our lives rather than narrate them. We feed our life events into the machine so that the smallest detail is recallable. But in feeding the machine, we neglect telling stories about those events. We share rather than narrate.
Your extended family and old high school friends know when your baby was born or that you got a new job or that you moved into a new house. But they don't know—can't know—what each event reveals about you or the story you tell yourself about your self. A Facebook profile or Instagram account is a dataset, not a narrative.
Emerging narratives
When I first started podcasting, I would fly from central Pennsylvania to the CreativeLive studio in Seattle and sit in a small room for two days to record eight to ten interviews. This was 2015, and I'd been absorbing podcasts and talk radio for over a decade. But in terms of practical experience, I had almost zero.
So, those first couple of recording sessions were my best attempt at overcoming fear and finding some rhythm when it came to interviewing. But by the third session or so, I started to relax. Instead of white-knuckling it through an interview, listening so intently in the moment that I felt like a wrung-out mop by the end of a conversation, I could pay attention on another level. I still listened intently, but I also started to sense how one conversation fit with another.
I noticed the narrative forming across interviews.
Each set of eight to ten interviews had a unique flavor. Sometimes, the connecting thread was a question I was interested in or a trend I'd noticed with clients. Other times, the narrative emerged from unseen links between my guests. Once I saw the tendency of a narrative to form, I could approach each set of interviews with the intention of finding that narrative and building on it.
In hindsight, these grueling interview marathons gave me a container in which, as Han put it, to contemplate. For two days of travel and two days of recording, I had the luxury of devoting my whole attention to the emerging narrative.
Later, I chose the narrative I'd pursue. I created four to six-episode vignettes exploring topics like managing uncertainty, designing a business model, or finding support as a small business owner. Most of the time, I identified the broad topic my audience wanted to learn about. Then, I'd brainstorm a bunch of different angles or exciting questions that I could shape episodes around. Once I had that list, I moved on to identifying guests. I wanted to talk to people with specific experiences or stories that would illustrate bigger lessons.
Each episode in a vignette pointed back to the theme and, in that way, was related to the others. It was a thematic structure rather than a story or argument.
In 2022, after I'd made more than 360 podcast episodes, I took the next step. I made my first 8-part series, “Time & Money."
It wasn't just that this series was longer than the ones I'd done previously. This series was the first in the style of podcasting we at YellowHouse.Media like to call "public radio lite." The beginning of the process—choosing a broad topic and brainstorming episode ideas—looked the same as before. But in the production phase, things got more interesting.
I began to think of my interviews as research. Just as I would incorporate ideas or data from a book or paper I read, I used ideas, storylines, or information from an interview to support the thesis of the episode. I also thought about the narrative of the series overall: How did each episode connect to the others? What order do I want to present them in? What journey do I want to take listeners on?
In my series, “Decoding Empathy," my thesis was that the folk understanding of empathy is based on projecting oneself into the experience of another and that this practice makes it difficult to see how others perceive and experience the world differently than we do. True empathy, I wanted to argue, came from recognizing the profound otherness of other people. To support that thesis, I did my research—reading, for sure, but also talking to incredible people whose work intersects with this idea of accepting difference for what it is.
From a practical standpoint, this narrative-building process led to six podcast episodes, six essays, and six visual essays (i.e., Instagram posts)—18 total pieces of content. Each of those pieces of content interlinks with the others. They provide multiple ways into the narrative, multiple ways to move deeper into the narrative, and multiple off-ramps into related ideas that aren't part of the narrative of the series.
It’s not perfect or comprehensive. But I think it makes sense. I’m satisfied with it. I created something I liked and shared it, along with the ideas it contains, with a lot of people.
Taking on a big project like that is, without a doubt, daunting. Without a plan (like an outline), it may feel like you just can’t get started. Like you’re lacking the complete set of instructions. Like if you only knew how to solve the “getting started” problem, everything would be okay.
However, the plan emerges from getting started. Yes, there will be a time to step back and ask yourself, “What do I have here? What am I really trying to say?” The plan emerges from tiny experiments, false starts, and brain dumps. The structure gives your ideas shape, but the thinking has to come first. Otherwise, the work becomes producing more information to simply check a box.
In the second section of Han's essay, he explores how our excess of information degrades our ability to pass on wisdom. He writes:
Communicable experience passed on by word of mouth is becoming increasingly rare. Nothing is passed down; nothing is narrated ... Wisdom is embedded in life as narrative. If life can no longer be narrated, wisdom deteriorates, and its place is taken by problem-solving techniques.
We share information, but we fail to pass on ideas. We generate data, but we fail to make sense of it. We post and post, but fail to communicate or connect.
And my goodness, I am ever so aware that I sound so cliche. So very Brooksian. So very ‘columnist at The Atlantic.’ I’ll try to do better...
So, how do we resist?
By embracing structure
Lately, I’ve been taking an hour or so in the middle of the day to touch grass, feel sun on my skin, and spend time away from my computer. I take books and my notepad, put on some minimalist neoclassical music, and think my thoughts. I scribble in my notepad, pause, and scribble some more. I’m writing, but I’m not Writing. Away from an open text file or Google Doc, my thoughts don’t have to fit into sentences, which fit into paragraphs, which form a knowledge product. I carve out little islands for questions and non-sequiturs. I draw arrows and construct diagrams. I copy out quotes and jot down facts. It’s a mess—but it’s good work. The next step is narration, finding the structure that will turn those thoughts into something meaningful.
Thoughtful structure can help reclaim the narrative we long for. Well-structured work helps us make sense of the world or our goals in a way that mere advice or information cannot. Structure helps us turn thoughts into thinking and thinking into communication.
When you incorporate thoughtful structure into an online course, a consulting proposal, a podcast episode, a coaching package, or any other offer, you help others orient themselves, creating a container in which they can think their own thoughts.
If all of that sounds like a lot of work, you're right. It is.
But it's also a lot of work to operate outside of narrative and keep up with the pace of a platform-mediated workload. Taking a step back to thoughtfully embed your work into the tradition of meaning-making and sense-making is ultimately much more satisfying than churning out information.
While I've used my own work scripting podcast episodes and writing essays as an example, using structure and plugging into narrative applies to much more than "creating content." It's an orientation to work that looks beyond the day-to-day slog and invites others to do the same.
A final thought: applying structure is risky.
Or at least, it feels risky. That's because structure reveals your project, your agenda. Structure is the organizational schema of theory. When you build a structure for your work, you're implying a theory of the thing you're narrating. You build an argument or dismantle one. You connect the dots or disconnect them. You offer an explanation or refute another.
Neither producing more information nor offering up a nugget of advice poses that risk. Feeding the algorithm doesn't pose that risk. But these actions also make no impact. Information and advice might help you stay afloat, but they won't help you break through.
Go ahead, take a risk. Tell us what it means. Help us make sense of what we see or feel. Offer us a structure that changes our perception. Whatever your work, it deserves a narrative—and so do you.
