The kind of roman numeral outline that Mrs. Grundy taught you in the fourth grade will work fine for a news report, a thesis, or an instructional book like this one. But it won’t uncover the patterns at the heart of story. I suspect that topical outlines flow from the verbal part of the brain, the speech center in the left hemisphere. Stephen Hall’s little experiment with storytelling during an MRI brain scan strongly suggests that story blueprints emerge from the right brain, and that the neural networks that help us visualize a story’s shape are closely linked to the visual cortex.
