The Reverse Outline
Revision tips for any stage of writing
Hi, I’m Kate. Ask an Author is a free newsletter providing advice and support for authors at all stages of writing, publishing, and hand-wringing. If you know someone this applies to, you can forward them this email and encourage them to sign up. Have a question? Fill out this form and I’ll answer it in a future response.
Dear Kate,
In one of your newsletters, you mentioned a reverse outline. Can you say more about what that is?
- DJ Casper
Dear DJ Casper,
Thank you for reading, and thank you for asking a very good question! I tossed out the term “reverse outline” in my post How to Tackle Large Projects (and see them through), but I didn’t explain or elaborate on it, so this is a great opportunity to talk about what that is and add some additional thoughts about outlining in general.
Here’s what I wrote in that newsletter, in a paragraph about some of the steps I go through to get from idea —> novel-shaped thing —> finished manuscript:
“I plot whole books on index cards that I arrange (and re-arrange) on my floor. I brainstorm in color-coded outlines so I can follow each character, each time period, each section of a plot all at once. I use large pieces of butcher paper so I can trace the entire plot of a novel on one page and look at it all together. I re-outline, searching for redundancies, non-sequiturs, and plot holes. I make reverse-outlines distilling what I’ve already written.”
A reverse outline is an outline based on what you’ve already written.
In a regular outline, you haven’t written anything yet. You start writing lists or bullet points or whatever revs up your brainjuices in order to guide yourself through the main elements of what you will write in the future. Your outline captures the central organization and structure of your piece, providing a roadmap you can then follow when you sit down to write. (Or discard as you get going - we support agents of chaos here, too!)
In a reverse outline, you’ve already got a draft of something written. Instead of writing a draft based on your outline, you write an outline based on your draft.
Let’s say you’re writing a novel (although of course you can apply this to any type of writing). You might have written an outline at an early point in your drafting process. Or maybe not! Plenty of writers don’t! Unlike your first outline, your reverse outline comes into play after you’ve already finished a draft (or possibly many drafts, sigh).
This reverse outline might look like a brief summary of each chapter you’ve written. A list of bullet points that go scene by scene through your story. If you want to trace each character’s arc, you can make a reverse outline that details step by step each turning point along your character’s journey. Instead of making up “here’s what I think will happen in my manuscript,” the way you would when writing a regular outline, you’re going through what you’ve already written and taking notes on it. This is an opportunity to come face to face with your manuscript and dig into what’s really on the page, distilling all those words you’ve written into their key flashpoints and core components.
Why bother making one of these?
Reverse outlining is one strategy I use to solve problems in my manuscript. I do this especially when I don’t know what the problem is. I just know that something isn’t clicking! When I’m stuck or uncertain, seeing an outline of my manuscript can help me get past all the blah blah description and extra details and “ooh I love this line!” or “ugh, I can’t believe I wrote that” to take a clearer look at the central elements of the story.
Things I often find:
scenes that are repetitive
scenes that can be combined or distilled
scenes that take too long to get from point A to B
subplots that take up too much space
entire characters that can be cut or combined!
chapters that aren’t pulling their weight
threads that are more important than I’d realized and need to be amplified
No matter how much I try to outline in advance, hoping I’ll be able to ward off these problems before I start writing (lol), my first draft inevitably goes in its own direction. And something that makes sense in an outline might not work as I’d expected once it’s on the page. It’s just different once something is *actually written.* I always know I’m going to need to go back through and spend time sorting out the (flawed) draft I’ve got down, not the (perfect) one that used to exist in my head.
Writing a novel is a process of telling yourself a story, getting to know that story inside and out in order to tell it better and better with each successive revision. An outline isn’t just a first step, never to be revisited once you’ve got a draft in place. It can continue to be useful to see your novel mapped out in one or two pages, allowing you to connect the dots in your mind without having to read through potentially hundreds of pages to get the gist or see the sticking points.
You can also make smaller reverse outlines. If I’m stuck on how a few scenes connect, I might open up a new Word doc and jot down little one-sentence summaries of each scene so I can better see, okay, what are the main elements here, what am I trying to say. What’s missing in the logic or the connective tissue or maybe the scenes should be reordered, maybe one of them isn’t necessary, maybe I need to add something else. You can do this within a single chapter, or even within a single paragraph. What is each sentence saying? What’s getting in the way? I tend to repeat myself when I’m drafting. I think I don’t trust that I’ve conveyed what I want to, and so I say it again. And again! But maybe with a twist! Which makes it harder to go back through and delete, because it’s not exactly the same thing so maybe I still need it! Who knows! Certainly not me, the author!
Again, a reverse outline can help me more readily identify what’s happening on the page. I can locate the areas that need to be reorganized, combined, deleted, or readdressed in some say, and feel confident that I’m getting across what I want.
I tend to write long, so my reverse outlines usually show me where I need to trim. If you write tight, you may find that reverse outlines show you where you need to expand your thinking and guide your reader along. A reverse outline can be a nice confirmation that yes, this does all make sense. Or it might show that uh oh, this is all over the place. I can’t say for certain where this strategy, or this term, came into my writing life, but when I Google “reverse outline” I see a bunch of academic websites, so I’m guessing I got it from either my teaching days or my own scholarship. It definitely comes up in thorny, argument-based writing that requires a logical progression with internal coherence. But writing is writing. It all needs to carry your reader through it, which means finding ways to revise, rethink, and reevaluate what’s on the page.
Kate, I hate outlines.
Great! You know yourself — and you know what not to do.
There’s no one answer or “right” way to revise. As always, if none of this connects to you or your writing process and all this outline talk seems like a total nightmare, don’t do it!! I’m never saying this is the one true way to write. Only that here’s a tool I like to have handy in my toolbox. If you want to add it to your toolbox too, maybe it’ll be something you try once and never pick up again, or maybe it’ll be something you reach for often. Maybe you won’t need it until that one irritating plumbing project that needs some special, specific kind of wrench, and you’re glad you have it in the back of your basement even if most of the time, you forget it exists.
Did I take that metaphor too far? Yes. Am I keeping it? Also yes.
If you have your own outlining tips, please comment and share! It’s always great to get new ideas and know we aren’t alone in figuring out *waves hands* all this.
Happy New Year and happy writing to all. Please let me know how I can help you reach your writing goals this year! I’m looking forward to your questions and to continuing to grow our little corner of the internet together.
Keep writing!
Kate