How to outline the story - for writing or...?

This guy uses Nesting Dolls as a metaphor for developing an outline for a story.  Pretty neat idea.

Very helpful! It reminded me of "The Snowflake Method" of outlining fiction plots that I stumbled on years ago. I need a balance between orgainizing everything beforehand and seeing where inspiration takes me, and I think your video also keeps writers in that balance mode.

My mind is not organized enough to create an outline.  Outlines require knowing what the story is about and I don't know that till it unfolds as I write it.  BUT, that's for the first draft.

Second draft for me is about making some sense of what I've written.  So I go through the manuscript and make headers and subheaders for each scene or significant place within a scene -- I write in Word and it's easy to use the Formatting tool to do so.  

I also use a Word tool called Document Map.  I can open a window in my writing screen and see all my headers (see photo, blurred out because I'm not prepared to share my current work in progress with the world yet).  I can see if the sequence of scenes make sense, and if I need to find a specific scene in the manuscript I can find it and jump to it by clicking on the header in the Document Map.  If I move a scene, I make sure to move it with its header, which automatically changes in the document map.

After many revisions of my current manuscript, what I thought were chapters turned out not be, but it was convenient to use them for navigation so at this point they still show on the Document Map.  The final manuscript will have proper chapters of course, and all those subheaders will have to go, too.  The nice part is that I can use the penultimate version of my manuscript to create a proper outline (for querying purposes -- some agents and publishers want to see outlines).

I hope my description makes some kind of sense!