Whenever someone asks me to share one thing from my RevPit experience, I'll say "writing a reverse outline.”
When other winners were asked to do a reverse outline by their RevPit editors, I prayed to dear God that I would be an exception. That thing intimidated me ever since I first learned about it. Sure enough, a few hours later, my editor Kyra emailed me asking to do a reverse outline.
Plot twist, I LOVED IT!
And in this blog post, I will do my best to convince you to be on #TeamReverseOutline because this tool is a game changer!
WHAT IS A REVERSE OUTLINE?
Some plantsers or plotters create an outline before they start writing the book. The difference here is that you create the outline after you complete a draft of your book. So whether you’re a plotter, plantser, or pantser, you can still do this.
It’s actually so much easier because you already have all the answers. It’s practically like an open-book fill-in-the-blank exam where you copy everything onto your answer sheet.
If you want the more formal and more eloquent explanation of what it is, here are some useful resources: Evaluate Your Story With A Reverse Outline - Jeni Chapelle Reverse Outlines: “Finding” your story during revisions - Chelsea Abdullah
WHY SHOULD I MAKE A REVERSE OUTLINE?
This method has SO MANY benefits that I’m tearing up thinking of my pre-reverse-outline writing days. Personally, I find it very useful to:
Reduce / add the word count
Identify chapters / scenes that drags on too long / is too short
Determine which scenes can be deleted or moved to another chapter
See a character’s overall growth throughout the story (including their relationship with others)
Avoid worldbuilding infodumping
Check the character agency
Personally, there were lots of things I didn’t notice in my book until I made my reverse outline. You may have betas, CPs, and maybe editors to help, but sometimes it’s hard to see what they see. With the reverse outline, you can see things from their perspective. Kyra even told me that I identified most of the issues she wanted to address thanks to the reverse outline. Hopefully, this will help give you some ideas to improve your story too.
HOW DO I MAKE A REVERSE OUTLINE?
I will do my best to guide you with a step by step tutorial (based on what I did). Feel free to alter it any way you like to fit your style, but I’ll share what personally worked for me. It took me two days to create a reverse outline of my book (77k words). I skimmed through everything which made it quicker.
I did mine on a spreadsheet, but I’ve seen others use bullet points too. I divided my rows into different sections (you can customize this too):
Chapter: Number every chapter you have and include their titles. If you don’t have titles, you can write down a keyword to know what the chapter is about. This is very useful when you want to find a specific chapter to refer to.
Plot: Write down every event and conversation that happens in the chapter. You can also include what the scene is supposed to accomplish in terms of external goal (or save that for a different row).
Character Development: Write down your character’s goal and how they progress toward it. You can also include their internal conflict. If you have multiple POV, you can include another row per character. (Good luck to those writing 6+ multi-POV chapters lol).
Relationship Development: Note down the progress of their relationship, whether romantically or platonically. It helps to see whether the development is too fast, slow, or good as it is.
Worldbuilding: This is incredibly useful for fantasy writers. You can note down worldbuilding details introduced in every chapter.
Notes: Additional commentaries to help you remember what changes to make, or what to pay attention to, etc.
Based on these, I got a full overview of my story and saw what changes to make. I also colored the text for my observations.
Green text: Expand the scene.
Means that I moved on to the next scene too fast, or there were still more goals/conflict to explore.
Pink text: Shorten the scene
The scene already accomplished its goals, but I wrote too many dialogues or descriptions.
Orange: Scene can be moved to different chapter
Either too many things are happening in the chapter, or it flows better elsewhere.
Red: Scene can be deleted
Even without this scene, the story flows well.
Then I would highlight each chapter based on how many changes I think it needs. Again, you can alter this or skip ot entirely. Some people might get intimidated, but I like seeing everything color coded. This is what I used.
Green: Chapter is good as it is
Yellow: Very minor changes
Orange: Lots of changes
Red: THIS IS TRASH! BURN IT DOWN!
Blue: Not sure what to do with this yet
SEEE? That wasn’t so hard, right? If you’ve got to this point, then congrats, you are ready to make your own reverse outline!
Here is a brief example of what my rows looked like along with the color-coded events in the first chapter.
And here is the overall reverse outline of my book. This is very blurry to avoid spoilers, but you can see how easily I can now keep track of EVERYTHING at a single glance instead of having to reread my chapters just to double check.
BENEFITS OF A REVERSE OUTLINE
If you are still not convinced, let me go in further detail about how this helped me. (I apologize in advance if you find any mistakes, but this is how it personally helped me revise.)
REDUCING WORD COUNT
Every chapter needs to have a purpose. It needs to accomplish growth in at least one of these rows. If a chapter doesn’t accomplish that, then you probably haven’t fully utilized your chapter to its maximum potential. Either you give the chapter more purpose, or you remove it.
With every scene, it would be good to consider “does the story flow well even without this scene?” “Is there another chapter with a similar scene?” “Does a different scene/chapter accomplish a similar goal?” If the answer is yes, then consider cutting it out. If there isn’t, then it’s doing a good job.
PACING
Check whether a chapter has too much or too little going on. You can switch a scene from a fully-packed chapter to another one that has less action. Keep everything balanced. Give readers a chance to breathe. You don’t want readers to get overwhelmed because too much is going on in one chapter, or bored because nothing is happening in another one.
You can also tell if things are escalating too fast or too slow. Are there maybe too many filler scenes before a big event? Are the chapters jumping from one big event to another? Do the flow of the scenes make sense or do you need something in between to transition it better? Now that you know what’s missing, you can make the necessary edits.
CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT
This helps to keep track of your characters’ goals and their internal conflict. If your character has multiple goals, the reverse outline helps to streamline everything into one overarching goal. You don’t want your character to develop a random goal in the middle of the story without mentioning it anywhere else (which can make it seem like an afterthought).
Mapping the character arc and how the characters see themselves during a certain chapter is useful. This helps you to see whether there’s a gradual change per chapter in their arc, or whether their growth is too fast or slow.
There may be times when instead of growing and moving forward, a character reverts back to their old habits (like during the angsty, big conflict chapters). Even so, there’s usually a difference in the way they handle things. If in the earlier chapters they let it happen, in the later chapters, they could be more proactive in trying to overcome it despite having the same worries and fears. Basically, make sure there is progress.
RELATIONSHIP DEVELOPMENT
This is useful if you have romantic/platonic relationship as part of your plot. It helps to map out the relationship of characters at the beginning of the story versus what they’ll become in the end.
Similar to character development, it is ideal if there is progress in every interaction (in case they don’t meet in every chapter). It helps you see whether their relationship is progressing too fast or too slow, which will also depend on your character’s personality and background. Those who are more shy could take longer to open up to others. And there are those with golden retriever energy who can easily befriend others. Whichever it is, the reverse outline helps you see whether the progress is believable.
Avoid a stagnant relationship. If it’s showing the exact same information/relationship as the previous few chapters/interaction, then it may be time to consider reworking or even deleting the scene. If you love the banter or a certain joke too much to delete it, you can consider switching it to a different chapter, or add more depth to the overall scene to reflect some growth.
WORLDBUILDING
The outline shows how many worldbuilding elements you’ve included in a single chapter. As writers, it’s natural to know your fantasy world inside out. But consider whether it’s necessary for readers to know THAT much about the world too. Which elements are absolutely crucial to the plot? Which ones can be omitted from the story, and it will still flow well? Hard decisions have to be made, but at the end of the day, you want readers to understand your story. Don’t confuse or overwhelm them.
Here's an actual screenshot from my worldbuilding column. These were all things that I introduced in ONE chapter. And mind you, my story is a YA contemporary romance lol. Kyra suggested me to be mindful of my genre's readers and only include gaming elements that were essential to the story's narrative. So most of these got deleted. (Not "For Fox Sake" though. I'm too proud of this guild name to change it.)
CHARACTER AGENCY
Ideally, you want your character to actively make their own decisions to move the plot forward. Sometimes we authors throw a situation at them and have them react to what they’ve been given. A reverse outline helps to see whether the next scene/chapter is a result of a character’s decision, or the result of a writer throwing them into a situation.
Even if a character is more passive or shy, they are faced with countless decisions everyday. Do they get up or snooze the alarm? Do they pursue their feelings or keep it to themselves? Do they go on a journey to slay a menacing dragon or do they escape and hide? Give your characters options to choose from, let them decide, and show us the consequence of that decision.
UNDERSTAND FEEDBACK BETTER
My betas told me my main character was unlikable because she was so insecure. I couldn’t understand why, until I did a reverse outline. Apparently, my MC complained about her worthlessness in every single chapter. Seriously, if I had to take a shot every time she talks about her insecurity, I’d be drunk by chapter three.
The problem isn’t that being insecure is unlikable, but that the way I handled it was bad. So with Kyra’s guidance, I did my best to project the MC’s insecurity in different ways instead of having her constantly remind us about it in every single chapter.
HOW DID IT HELP ME WITH MY NEXT STEP?
Now that I knew which areas to improve on, it was time to plan out my revision. The reverse outline was really useful to help me sort through my entire manuscript. I deleted whole chapters, wrote in completely new ones, and moved later scenes earlier into the story. By switching around scenes, it’s also important to remember the character arc. A character’s reaction to the same events can change depending on the stage of the character/relationship development they’re in.
Overall, it really was like playing a puzzle and trying to fit the old and the new together to create a better and improved narrative. Because everything was already there at my disposal, I could easily move scenes around to see what works better. In the end, I had a very detailed scene-by-scene guideline. All I had to do was write it.
There may be times where you will stray from the guideline, which is fine. While writing, I also realized that certain chapters flowed better differently, or that I needed to add in another scene to transition it better. I recorded those changes in the new outline as well to make sure everything still flowed well.
NOW IT'S YOUR TURN!
I started out hating the idea of doing a reverse outline, but fell hopelessly in love with it. Even if it sounds or looks intimidating, learning about the reverse outline was so worth it. I will use this tool for all my future stories. Even if you're already an editing genius, I would still recommend you to try this... for fun.
I hope this post was useful and convincing enough to help you write a reverse outline. If there's one thing I can share from winning RevPit, it's this. So come join #TeamReverseOutline and improve your manuscript in a way you won't regret!
Good luck and have fun!