Writers are encouraged to write in scene rather than in summary of scene. You are asked to jump into the dynamic process, to start anywhere along the storyline, ignoring the problems of structure and skipping the complex difficulties of finding your story’s “beginning.”
The idea is that you write the scenes of your story’s story first, allowing it — whether fiction or nonfiction — to devise its own mechanical structure. In architectural terms: you first fill the rooms with narrative life, and — in so doing — you’ll be devising the structure of the house automatically, giving your book exactly the right size.
SFGate’s review of my book Architecture of the Novel: A Writers’ Handbook does a good job of explaining how it works. http://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Architecture-of-the-Novel-3255341.php
