How Do We Get to the End of the First Act?

i'm curious if it is still necessary to outline, or do you do just more as a flow of consciousness when you're sitting down ard writing about your own life. What i did was to write down lots of index cards, individual incidents, as many things as i could remember tthis time I rand basigly around the period of violence and troubles from our point of view. And then when i wrote it, i again, improvised and changed things around. So i did have a, i kind of tried to catch the memories, then i tried to organize them, and then they sort of organized me.