When I finally sat down to do a reverse outline for the first time, I cracked myself up. Iād just gotten into Pitch Wars, a mentorship program for novel revision, and I was waiting for my edit letter. Iād already done one major overhaul before applying, but some big things were still just off about the book I was working on. I could feel it on a murky gut level, and Iād chatted with my mentors about their big-picture thoughts. I wanted to get my head around what was going wrong in more detail, so Iād be as ready as possible when their edit letter landed.
Even with all the craft resources I'd been bingeing, up to then Iād dragged my feet about using a beat sheet. Save the Cat just felt soā¦bossy? Restrictive? Rigid? I was scared that following it would stifle whatever mysterious thing keeps me writingāand it had been stifled for years, once, already. I really didn't want to go back to that.
But during the application period, some of the mentors who did Q&As had talked about reverse outlines (i.e. taking the draft of the novel you already have, reverse-engineering an outline and analyzing its structureāparticularly looking at where different important elements fall compared to the Save the Cat beats). It sounded like a good way to get in there and see whatās going on.
So I started in on one, late at night, chewing on my fingernails, plugging my scene word counts into a spreadsheet. And when I finished, I had to sit back and laugh. More accurately: breathlessly giggle, wheezing, kind of unhinged. Ohhhh, I thought, well there's one problem. My "Break Into IIā story beat, which is supposed to come around 20 percent of the way into the book, was hanging out around 35 percent.
Since then I've come to really appreciate Save the CatāI feel like the beats are a way to stay on track and create a satisfying buildup and payoff. And itās comforting having tools to make the things that feel amorphously off more tangible and nameable. That reverse outline helped me see past how I feel in the thick of the story and let me take a look at what's going on with its bones.
So today I'm going to pick up where I left off in the last newsletter and talk about how I plan a full rewrite. (Again, the usual disclaimers apply: I've mainly written YA contemporary so far, so my process is shaped by that; everyone's brain is different and when it comes to writing and revising a novel, you have to find what works for you; take what you like and leave the rest).
Over the course of the full rewrites I've done, I've settled into a roughly three step process:
1) Daydreaming & brainstorming (character work, generating new plot ideas, reconnecting with the heart of the story, thinking more deeply about the themes and what I want the story to feel like)
2) More detailed big-picture planning (reverse outlining, re-plotting, breaking arcs of change down into smaller pieces, making sure things build)
3) Writing through & doing more scene-level planning as I go (organizing new ideas I get along the way, scene construction, fine-tuning the emotional ripple effects and focusing even more on how things build)
Last time I talked about the softer brainstorming phase. Today I'm going to talk about the second oneāhow I use different tools to organize my thoughts and shape them into a more concrete plan.
Reverse outlining
There are lots of blog posts and templates out there for this, but here's how I like to do it specifically:
* I'll make a spreadsheet where each row is a scene of the book. (Working with scenes as the basic unit makes the most sense to me, because it encourages me to give each one a mini arc and to make sure the characters are changing a little bit in each one). In this spreadsheet, I give each scene some kind of shorthand name that makes sense to me, and I end up using this internal shorthand a lot throughout the next several months of revising. In my notes to myself I'll be like, Move this into the FIRST NIGHT DRIVE scene! Take this out of the BLEACHERS scene! Add more tension to the BAGOONG scene!
* In the next column, I'll add each sceneās word count. (If you draft in Scrivener, this should be easy! Personally I use Google Docs to draft and I love soothingly mindless, rote tasks, so I actually just go through the manuscript, highlight each scene to see the word count and plug that in)
* In the next two columns, I'll set up conditional formatting to show me: the total manuscript word count after each scene, and what percentage of the way through the book that scene falls at.
* I'll add some more columns to: describe the purpose of each scene; note how the characters change in this scene; note if that scene is a major story beat, so I can compare where it currently falls percentage-wise to where Save the Cat says it should be.Ā
* Then I stare at the spreadsheet for a long time, and try to diagnose what's wrong. I'll identify scenes that aren't doing as much narrative work (the purpose isn't as clear or overlaps with another scene or the characters aren't changing much), that I can potentially cut and combine with other scenes. I'll also look at whether the characters are changing steadily, or whether an emotional turning point is too abrupt, and maybe I should add another scene to set things up better.
Organizing my chaotic notes
I make a lot of notes during the brainstorming stage! Sometimes I need to tell myself the same things a few different ways to really internalize it. They'll end up all over the placeāin my notes app, in my journal, in comments in the manuscript doc. So Iāll comb through every place I've left notes and consolidate the takeaways into one neater, more organized note to myself with headers, etc. This also lets me do one more round of digesting my thoughts about the revision before I start re-plotting and re-outlining.
Re-plotting
So now Iāve analyzed the current draft, and I've organized my big-picture thoughts about what that draft needs. Next I'll start figuring out how I want my outline to change for the next versionāwhat scenes I want to move, delete, add new, and what the new sequence of those scenes should be. I could conceivably skip this step and go straight into making a new outline, but I like to get my head around it in a more tactile way first, especially if I'm going to need to add a lot of new material. In the rewrite I did during Pitch Wars, for example, I changed so much that the third quarter of the story was basically entirely new scenes.Ā
I'll brainstorm by hand so I can cross things out, make a mess, add side-thoughts winding up the sides of the page. I'll make notes with arrows about how one event causes the nextāIāll pay attention to whether there's enough of a domino effect between the plot points, or whether events are floating disconnected from what precedes and follows them.
It can be a lot! So I'll tackle it by hand or map it out with sticky notes along the wall first, before moving it into a nice new outline spreadsheet tab.
Making a new outline
I'll duplicate my reverse outline spreadsheet into a new tab, and edit that so it becomes the new outline I'm working toward. I'll delete the scenes I'm removing, move scenes as needed, add rows for the new scenes I want to write on this pass. This spreadsheet will basically be my home away from home for the next several months of working on the revision.
Tracking different story threads
I'll build out this spreadsheet to help me keep track of everything I want to make sure is steadily developing and changing throughout the book. This is where I really start breaking down my big-picture thoughts into scene-level, actionable tasks.
I do this mainly by making a bunch of columns for different threads of the storyāhow the characters are moving along their arcs, how relationship dynamics are shifting, the development of themes, subplots and side characters I'd let disappear for too long in the previous draft, any elements I wanted to amp up more.Ā
For example, during the Pitch Wars rewrite, I had some obvious columns: How Deedee changes, how Jay changes, how Deedee's mom changes, what's going on with Deedee's best friend in every scene. And I had some for specific things I wanted to build up: Deedee and Jayās shifting attitudes about the past; her momās ghost stories; Deedeeās thoughts about photography; her relationship to her guilt. I had a column just to push myself to look ahead to the next big emotional moment and think about pressures and tensions that should be building already.
I don't worry about filling all of this in perfectly or completely. I just use it as a tool to organize the thoughts I do have, and to prompt reflection if there are obvious gaps, or if a thread goes away for too long.Ā
This way, all of my thoughts about one thread live in a column; if I feel like an aspect of the story isnāt building the way it should, I can read down vertically and see whatās missing, and what scenes I potentially need to add something to. And all my thoughts about what needs to change in a particular scene now live along a single rowāso when I rewrite that scene, I can read along it horizontally and see everything I need to think about.
I'll modify the spreadsheet continually while I'm revising, but at this stage, I use it to break the brainstorming I've done into smaller, more manageable pieces.
Making a calendar
In another column of the spreadsheet, I like to plot out target dates for me to finish rewriting each scene. I try to be realistic, pad my estimates, make it comfortable. But it puts my mind at ease to plan it out.
Time is pretty confusing to me, generallyāI find it hard to conceptualize, and I'm an antsy person as it is. So it helps me to break the work of a revision into reasonable chunks plotted over time. It makes me think: this is doable. There will be a time when it's over. (Maybe your relationship to time is different and this would stress you out! As always, I'm not here to tell you what to do lol, I support you).
The way I manage my time has been different with every big revision. In Pitch Wars, I spent every free moment outside of work on revisions, rewrote multiple scenes a day, finished the bulk of the rewrite in about six weeks, then went in again for a few smaller rounds of revision after feedback. A lot of my favorite parts of the book came out of this intense period! There's something to be said for speed breaking down inhibitions and being good for creativity.
But once I'd finished that rewrite, I was completely spent in a way that I didn't fully recover from for a long time afterward. I don't feel like that pace is sustainable for me.
I preferred the way I worked on my third full rewrite of this book, the one I did after signing with my agent. I set aside two hours a day for writing, in the early mornings before work, and Iād spend two of these writing sessions on each scene: one devoted to gathering my thoughts and doing more detailed planning, one for actually writing it through. The time between those sessions also helped a lotāI'd plan out the scene, think about it in the back of my mind all day, look over my notes before I went to bed, and wake up feeling like I had a lot of clarity about exactly what I wanted to write. I loved this method and felt like it allowed me time and mental space to get the details right, and I plan to aim for this in the next full rewrite I'm doing.
You might say: isn't this all horribly ineffecient, since you had to do multiple full rewrites? Sure, maybe! But worrying too much about being efficient makes me choke and gets me stuck, and forging ahead imperfectly has kept me moving and gotten me a little closer each time. Novels are many-layered, and each rewrite leveled up the story, even if every layer wasnāt there yet. So until I find something better, this works. (And it's not like anyone will give me a prize for getting there in fewer drafts).
Okay! So thatās the second stage of how I approach a full rewrite. Because I'm a discovery writer, like I mentioned, I'll also get a lot of ideas while Iām in the process of rewriting, and theyāll come out of order, about all different parts of the book. So in the next newsletter, I'll talk about how I catch and organize those ideas while staying focused, and how I continue to regroup and do planning work alongside rewriting.
Talk to you next time! Thanks for reading <3
Love always,
Clare