Reverse Outlining: What, Why, and How
We might be talking reverse outlines, but we’re definitely not moving backwards. In this blog post, I’ll walk you through a strategy that will help you identify exactly what’s happening in your novel draft and exactly what you need to do to move forward with your second draft!
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Newsflash!! Outlines aren’t just tools for planning your novels—you can also use an outline to revise your novel.
Now, if you’re a pantser, don’t run away from me yet. If you pantsed your way through the first draft, reverse outlines are actually the perfect tool for taking that messy first draft (or discovery draft, or draft zero) and turning it into a coherent story that your future readers will love.
The beauty of a reverse outline is that it’s used to analyze what you already have, not to decide what you’re going to do. If you’ve avoided outlines because you don’t want to limit your creativity, a reverse outline is perfect for making sure that the creative story you’ve crafted works for your future readers.
In this blog post, I’m going to take you through the what, why, and how of reverse outlining so you know exactly how to make this revision tool work for you and your writing process, no matter how you got your first draft done.
What is a reverse outline?
At the most basic level, it’s an outline you create after you write your novel. The key is to ensure that your summary captures what you’ve actually put on the page. Not what you intended to put on the page, not what you think you put on the page.
A reverse outline is an opportunity for you to be brutally honest about what is and isn’t happening in your novel. It’s not aspirational. It’s realistic. It’s honest. It’s an opportunity to really lay out your character arcs, plot developments, and structure in an easy to consume format.
Why bother? What can a reverse outline do for me?
Novels are big, complex projects. It’s easy to get lost in the weeds of your story and fail to look at your novel as a whole. A reverse outline helps you look at the big picture of your story’s structure without losing your mind trying to hold every plot development in your head at the same time.
I recently wrote about the #1 mistake writers make in revision: skipping the revision process altogether. By that I mean that writers jump straight to the nitty-gritty of editing. They tweak their prose, fine-tune their descriptions, and hunt out those pesky typos, but they don’t take the time to make sure that their novel is working on the level of the story as a whole.
I think one of the reasons writers avoid revision is how complicated and difficult it can be to revise your story at a structural level. Working from a reverse outline make that process much, much easier by giving you a simple, condensed version to work from.
Instead of trying to analyze the entire draft at once, the reverse outline makes it much easier to see what is and isn’t working in your story. You can also make changes to the reverse outline first by noting where you’re going to add scenes, big changes that you need to make to your existing scenes, or the scenes that you need to get rid of altogether.
Making these changes to the reverse outline first gives you a blueprint for the rewrite, which makes it much easier to implement those story level changes without losing sight of how your story’s overarching structure.
Okay, I’m sold! But how do I create a reverse outline?
Creating a reverse outline doesn’t need to be complicated. Here are the steps to creating and using your reverse outline:
Choose your format. Create an outline that is comfortable for you to navigate and use. Whether that’s bullet points in a Word/Google doc, a spreadsheet with a line for each scene, or an outline you create in Dabble, Scrivener or any other writing software. The key is that you use the tech that works best for you. The only thing I don’t recommend is a handwritten outline.
Why not? The reverse outline should be a living document, it’s something you’ll edit repeatedly until you’ve created the story arc that works for you. Writing by hand will make it too difficult to make revisions and defeat the purpose of writing a reverse outline to begin with.
Skim your manuscript and summarize each scene. Go through your manuscript, reading or skimming each scene and summarizing it in your reverse outline. Try to capture both what happens and why it matters to the characters.
Note, I said scenes and not chapters. Even if you worked at the chapter level while drafting, I recommend working with scenes in your reverse outline. They’re the smallest narrative unit and your story will succeed or fail at the scene level. Not sure what it means to write in scenes? No worries! Check out my primer on scene writing here and an explanation of why scenes are the secret weapon you need to strengthen your writing here.
Evaluate your story. This is where the real magic happens! Now that you have a clear overview of what happens in your story, work through your outline, checking to see if your story builds in a satisfying way. Now, I won’t lie. That’s easier said than done. But I’m not leaving you hanging. Here are some tips that will help:
Use a structure system to evaluate your story’s structural foundations. To help, check out these blog posts on common plot structures and less common structures that you can use in your writing.
Analyze your story’s conflict and make sure you’re both raising the stakes and making life difficult for your character. James Scott Bell’s book Conflict & Suspense is one of my absolute favorite craft resources for a reason. Though it isn’t about plotting exactly, it will illuminate what you need to do to create a story that works.
Apply the four C’s: character, conflict, change, and cause/effect. Make sure your characters are developed on the page, make sure your conflicts are high-stakes and that you’ve taken them as far as they can go, make sure your characters and/or their world changes by the end of your novel, and make sure your plot develops are linked by cause and effect throughout.
Grab Tiffany Yates Martin’s book Intuitive Editing and let her walk you through every aspect of revision. Yates Martin calls the reverse outline an x-ray outline, but it’s basically the same thing as a reverse outline. Even better, she walks you through various elements of a novel so that you know exactly what to look for in your reverse outline.
Overwhelmed by all of the things you need to critique? I can help! I created a reverse outlining workshop that walks you through every step of the process to create and analyze your reverse outline. Grab that workshop for just $49 here!
Revise your reverse outline. Now that you’ve found the strengths and areas for growth in your outline, it’s time to plan out your changes. Add new scenes in a different color/font, mark the changes that you want to make to other scenes, and note where you’re going to delete scenes that are currently in your manuscript. At this stage, your reverse outline is ready to be employed as a checklist for your revisions!
Get feedback. Didn’t know you could get feedback on an outline? Now you do! Once you’ve planned your revisions, it’s time to bring in an outside perspective and get feedback on your story at structural level. Interested? Check out my outline review service now. Once you’ve gotten feedback, you can make final revisions to your reverse outline.
Use your reverse outline as a revision roadmap. Now it’s time to actually implement the revisions you’ve planned. Use your reverse outline as a step-by-step guide to rewriting your novel. As you work through your manuscript, write the scenes you’ve decided to add, delete the ones you’ve decided to take out, and revise any scenes that need to be adjusted.
That doesn’t mean you have to work through the novel chronologically. The beauty of a reverse outline is that you’ve already made the big decisions about what to do with your story, now you’re free to jump around in your reverse outline, writing the scenes that inspire you during any given writing session.
Now that you know a reverse outline is and how it can help your revision process, it’s time to go forth and create your reverse outline! Trust me, your revision process will be better for it!
And don’t forget, grab the reverse outlining workshop here for just $49 and I’ll walk you through every step of creating and analyzing your reverse outline!
Happy Writing ♥️♥️
FYI: This post contains affiliate links. If you use these links to buy something we may earn a commission. For more information click here and thanks, as always, for your support!
