Now you’re on your way to a complete first draft. Here is my list of specific strategies for making sure you get there. • Sit down with all your writing, hold your nose, and read through everything you’ve written several times, looking for different things: —Read just for material that stands out as interesting. —Read for dominant themes. • Read for interesting or annoying questions that occur to you as you go through what you’ve written. • Read for organizational markers. • Read in order to organize, marking themes with codes, numbers, letters, or colors. • Read to extract a provisional outline. • Read through and put a check in the margin next to anything that’s interesting, or seems like it might have potential, or even seems terribly wrong. • If you find recognizable paragraphs in the mess, try summarizing each of them in a single sentence. This exercise serves several functions: you find out if your paragraph has a central idea, or if it has too many ideas to be covered in a single paragraph; you also produce a collection of sentences that will make it much easier to see the shape of a possible outline. • If you already have some idea of what approximate categories or themes you’re going to develop in your chapter, take out your colored markers, assign a color to each of them, and go through what you’ve written, color-coding the pieces. If you’re working on a word processor, move the pieces you’ve marked in different colors on your hard copy into different files, rearranging the text to reflect the categories you’ve defined. You’re now well on your way to producing an outline.