Why You Should Create A Reverse Outline
- Jerrica Black
- Sep 10
- 7 min read
Updated: Nov 5
Reverse outlines are a fantastic tool for big picture editing of fiction, creative nonfiction and all other forms of nonfiction! In fact, some of the best resources are geared toward academic papers like the ever helpful Purdue Owl Reverse Outlining; I often turn to Owl Purdue to assist for academic and journalistic style guidelines. It was a huge help during college. But let’s take this idea, expand and alter it to work for fiction.
But first…
What is a Reverse Outline?
A reverse outline is the outline you make after you’ve written your draft. Where an outline is used to build your story off of, a reverse outline returns what you’ve written to the bare bone basics. It also ensures that the outline you have actually reflects your story, because it is quite likely things have shifted or changed since your initial outlining phase.
It’s a place to capture the essence of every scene and chapter. You’ll plot character arcs, red herrings and foreshadowing. And best of all you’ll understand the importance and purpose of each scene. Which also means you’ll find all the loose ends to tie up and holes to fill in.
Basically, it’s called a reverse outline because it’s working backwards from the text rather than being the backbone for writing it.
How Do I Make a Reverse Outline?
Well, if we follow Owl Purdue’s system, there are two major types of notes you’ll want to take: main topic and argument advancement. So let’s switch that to something that makes a bit more sense for a work of fiction… how about the main events and story advancement. Main events will help create a timeline while story advancement will reveal a purpose for each scene. We’ll get deeper into what each should include momentarily.
There are certainly other ways to set up your reverse outline, so experiment with it. But if you have truly no idea where to start with a scene by scene summary for the purposes of creating a helpful editing document, this is a good place to gain some insight.
The Structure and Organization
How you organize your reverse outline is ultimately up to you. Owl Purdue suggests a right and left margin organization, I don’t think that is particularly helpful for us. Partially because doing that on a digital document is a little difficult (though feel free to print your manuscript and do things the old fashioned way!) and partially because our notes are likely less brief than theirs (though brevity is still important.) A second document, a spreadsheet or a notebook will be more useful (or perhaps a combination of document and spreadsheet for ultimate organization!)
You may choose to work in a document with headings, sub headings and jot notes; create a table to act as a left and right margin; or use a spreadsheet with labelled columns for all the information you want to capture. As long as your information is clearly labelled, you should be golden.
The goal is to be able to glance at the information and see a clear timeline (for your main and sub plots,) a purpose for every scene, and, if you’re so inclined, easily see themes, motifs, clues, character arcs and relationships.
The Information Capture
The Main Event
Summarize, summarize, summarize.
This section should capture the events of the scene at a basic level. We don’t need all the details, we really just need characters, setting and action. You may even choose to set up a column for your narrative elements and just insert names and places to keep things very minimal. You may want to track sub plots separately from your main plot, but that’s up to you.
These Main Event notes are simply a summary of the surface level timeline. Since this is useful as a timeline, I'd highly encourage keeping track of how much time has passed between and maybe during scenes depending on your time scale.
Story Advancement
Why is this scene here?
Is it to introduce a new character, create conflict, give context? If you can’t figure out why it’s here, it might not need to be here at all. This is part of the reason for examining this aspect of each scene. While not every scene needs to obviously move the plot forward, it should have a purpose beyond being pretty on the page.
Extra
There may be some other things you’d like to keep track of throughout. These will be highly dependent on your genre and story. For instance, if you’re writing a mystery, keeping track of what hints you’ve dropped to your reader versus what the character’s know will be crucial. If you’re drawing on certain motifs throughout your piece, knowing the instances of those will be helpful to see if it’s becoming repetitive or if there’s a place you could add more.
How to Use it
So you’ve made this reverse outline, and apparently it’s a great revising tool, but how should you actually put it into play? Your reverse outline is going to take away some of the overwhelm of the whole manuscript. You now have a clear timeline without all the beautiful fluff surrounding it that makes it a novel. You can focus on the big picture without getting sidetracked by your grammar mistakes or stylistic choices.
Ignore your manuscript!
Yes, you heard me right! Put your manuscript away and focus on just this reverse outline. We’re going to edit this first.
We’ll focus on the Main Event section first. We’re going to look at the timeline of things without worrying too much about anything else. This is the “Does it make sense?” section of editing. You’ll be looking for plot holes, inconsistencies, loose ends and pacing.
Does the chronology make sense?
If Johnny’s arm is broken in scene two and out of the cast in scene five but only two days have passed, something is awry.
What’s the pacing like?
Does Ursula get attacked then in the next scene Keith does? And then you let ten scenes go by before the attacker shows up again and nothing else really happens? You might have a pacing problem.
Are there any missing pieces or questions left unanswered?
If there’s a gold watch collected as evidence at the crime scene, but we never find out whose it is? Readers will notice.
Are there contradictions in your story?
If Julia says she hates tomatoes but is later seen eating spaghetti bolognese, that’s a problem.
Let’s take a look at our Story Advancement section next. It really comes down to “Is this scene necessary?” or “Does this scene have a purpose?” Now, you’ll see the advice that every scene must move the plot forward, but that can be interpreted a little differently than just “action.” The purpose can be characterization, world building, context, tension, or setting the tone but the scene must have a purpose. And this purpose works hand-in-hand with the pacing question from your Main Event section.
Does every scene have a purpose?
Are there any scenes where you left this section blank? It’s probably safe to say you can ditch that scene.
How much did you fight to find a purpose, and therefore how real is that purpose?
Did you have to try really hard to keep this scene simply because you love it? Maybe you should rethink if the scene truly belongs or if you can insert some substance.
The Extras section is a little harder to talk about in a general sense, but I feel like you’ll have a good understanding of why you’re tracking them. You may be using it to track reveal pacing, motif repetition, theme appearance, specific relationship or side character evolution… whatever you’ve chosen (if anything) make your notes on changes and additions you’d like to make as you’ve done with the Main Event and Story Advancement sections.
Return to your Manuscript!
Now that you’ve had the chance to look at the big picture of your story, you may finally return and make your revisions. I do suggest taking a few days away to let everything sink in and finish processing; you may end up with more ideas and realizations while your mind has time to wander.
Work through your notes scene by scene making your changes. Considering some of the tips in The Process of Editing Your First Draft will be helpful in this instance. Hopefully you’ve let it rest, and if you’ve completed your reverse outline you’ve certainly read before revising, but I highly recommend rewriting over just revising.
Some Final Thoughts on Reverse Outlines
Not every reverse outline will look the same, and over time you’ll figure out what information you need to capture for your process. Some will need a simple summary paragraph for each scene while others will prefer a detailed spreadsheet with just a few words to capture each category. And further, each manuscript will have different needs. Knowing your editing goals going in can be super helpful. For instance, if you want to take a good look at a certain relationship, you can focus on collecting that information with a focused reverse outline. This may be helpful for editing the second, third or fourth draft rather than the first.
The thing to walk away with here is that using a reverse outline can assist in the big picture editing of first drafts by giving you some space from the text itself. When we’re editing the text it’s easy to be distracted by the prose when we actually want to look at the narrative elements.
I’m curious to know what “extra” information you’re collecting alongside your scenes’ main events and purposes! Let me know your genre and added categories below!
And if you’re working on a short story or short creative non-fiction and want a little extra guidance, you know where to find me and my contact form!
Watch the video!
Jerrica is a writer and editor who inspires up-and-coming writers to create compelling fiction and creative nonfiction works while providing them with the confidence to do it themselves or ask for a helping hand when they need it. She enjoys speculative fiction, horror and gut-wrenching emotion with a side of food & drink and the cozier things in life.
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