#reverse outline

[the-wip-project]

With the big annual novel writing month coming up there’s a lot of excitement and preparation going on. 

The thing is, while doing Nano can be a great experience, it’s definitely not for everyone.

It’s overwhelming to a lot of people, takes a lot of time and energy, and is notorious for burning writers out. Most people quit well before reaching 50k, and among those rare few that make it across the finish line, many end up creatively exhausted and don’t write again for months.

Personally, I find that a slower more persistent approach is far more effective long term.

What if, instead of spending hours a day grinding out words in a blur of stress and exhaustion, you could write your novel in fifteen to twenty minutes a day?

That is my challenge. On November 1st, join me for a SloMo WriNo. Spend fifteen minutes writing, every day (or most days, we’ll discuss that in a later post) for a year, and by November 2024 you’ll have a novel completed.

And drop by the WIP Project discord. We’ll be able to encourage each other, do group sprints and share our progress.

More posts to come with all the details on how this will all work. Plus help on setting your word count goals, finding the time to write, and suggestions on the best ways to manage an outline and track your progress. Don't worry! It's going to be fun!

— Maree

[authorkarajorgensen]

Planning for Pantsers

This week's blog is about how to plan your work when you are naturally resistant to plotting, a discovery writer, or a pantser.

I fully admit that I am a pantser by nature. I love to dive headfirst into writing and figure it out as I go… until it stops working and I hit the wall bug on a windshield style. Over the years, I’ve tried to devise a way to balance out my discovery writer side, which I need to be enthused about writing, with my need to know where I’m going to avoid creating a colossal, unsolvable mess. I like…

[writingwithfolklore]

Stripping away Supports

                In classic outlining structure, the midpoint is where your MC loses all the advantages they’d relied on up until that point—allies, resources, powers, etc. In fact, this structure is used in so many films that the ‘characters fight at the midpoint’ is an easily found cliché throughout media.

                However, there are other ways of stripping away your MC’s supports to achieve the same effect.

They fight

Okay I know I just implied we might want to avoid this, but why fix what’s not broke? The important part about following the ‘characters fight at the midpoint’ trope is to ensure the fight doesn’t start at the midpoint, but rather starts from the very moment the characters are seen with each other/meet. The fight should be about something that’s been brewing underneath all of their interactions from the beginning—the one thing they should’ve talked about but didn’t. The ‘elephant in the room’.

                This fight is less of a fight but an unearthing of feelings, thoughts, and problems that have always been there, but have been ignored or avoided up until then. What’s the event that unearths these truths? Typically, something threatening or scary causes people to speak ‘out of turn’…

2. The protagonist chooses to go on alone

Something big happened, something so dangerous and scary that the protagonist intentionally pushes away their allies in order to protect them… Of course, later they might realize that they are stronger together anyway. This is also a bit of a cliché, but done thoughtfully can be very impactful.

3. The allies are in over their head

The reversal of the last trope, instead of the protagonist pushing their allies away, the allies decide this quest is far too dangerous and risky for them… The protagonist is abandoned by their allies. Later, these supports may return, their love for the protagonist stronger than their fear of the situation, but whatever happened must have spooked them bad enough to lead them to betrayal.

4. An integral piece they’ve been relying on has been destroyed

The hideout was found and torched, the old man’s journal was tossed into the sea, the leader/mentor/keeper of information has been kidnapped or killed. Maybe the allies and the protagonist are still together, but one important thing that’s been keeping them together or leading them has been lost, now they have to adapt and improvise on the fly if they wish to continue their quest.

5. An integral piece they’ve been relying on turned out to not be true or important

Similar to the last but with a bit of a twist. They’ve been following the wrong lead all along—where to go next now that the very foundation of their quest is crumbling beneath them?

          

What are some other ways of fulfilling the midpoint reversal?

[fanbynature]

Seonghwa:*being silly*

Hongjoong:I don’t understand you, but I find you amusing, support you and might join you

[bettsfic]

Hi!

I recently decided I want to write genre fiction. I have ideas and would love to try. But I have come to realize that my writing is just naturally literary leaning. Very character focused, and internally driven more than anything. Sometimes a bit passive. I was wondering, if you had a student who was the same way, how would you direct them to learn to get better at the external conflicts and the various genre conventions?

reverse outline everything. buy a really fancy notebook and a nice pen, and take down notes about every story you encounter, especially ones in the genre you'd like to write in. tv shows, movies, books, video games, everything. make a bullet point list of Things That Happen. when the story is over, review your notes and highlight the inciting incident, moments of rising action, the climax, and the resolution. notice also *when* these things happen, at what percentage of the story. find an existing structure you like, say the three-act play, and draw lines between the bullet points that signal the end of each act. draw major conclusions about the way every story works. avoid criticism; practice neutral observation. if you find a movie you like, read the script. annotate the hell out of your books. articulate and witness your own perspectives of narrative.

when you reverse outline habitually, you start to internalize story structures and deploy them more easily and intentionally. you start seeing patterns in cause and effect, events that are expected or unexpected, plot beats that aim to satisfy or disappoint. and even if you're only noticing and jotting things down, your observations will naturally, eventually, bleed into your own work.

[asurrogateblog]

(grabbing you by the shoulders) no but do you understand? do you understand what I mean when I say that fame does NOT give you immortality, it makes you MORE mortal. if you do something that has a big enough effect on the world around you (like, idk, creating some of the most historically influential music ever made), now that event is not only fixed in this reality's timeline, but also in the timeline of every single fictional reality taking place on earth past the date of that event. your non-existence would now cause much larger butterfly effects than it would for the average person, so for those other 'realistic' fiction realities to still make sense, everything that happened to you leading up to that moment has to have happened in some way. and by that same logic, if you die, you die in more than just this universe. you have to die in all of the others too. so you are more dead than other people, not less

[daisydoox0-blog]

I’m combining Saw and Pokémon and since Arven is one of my favorite characters and the fact that he’s a depressed character, I did an outline of him in the Reverse Beartrap. More details and color will be added later.

[willowcrowned]

sartre had it wrong, hell isn't other people. hell is when you need to do a first task so that you can do a second, more pleasurable task but you cannot manage to bully, bribe, or manipulate yourself into doing anything at all. hell.

[menlove]

I've come to the conclusion that I just enjoy writing fics w other people more than I enjoy writing alone like nothing more artistically motivating than this image

[knotwerk]

holy shit i fucking love editing. (remind me i said that in two weeks.) 

i’m working on the proper hydration series finale aka PH6. i finished writing the first draft on 4/6/24, clocking in at 85k words. and then i sat on it for a few days before rereading it, did an extremely cursory once-over edit, and sent it off to my first reader & og beta @demolitionwoman-blog (CHEERS!!!). she started working on the beta, and by the time she hit chapter 3, she made the observation that the next step in the editing process for this might not be a typical beta read, but a structure/development read, and maybe a reverse outline would be a good next step. 

and i was like, i have never heard of a reverse outline. like, i have never heard of most things, really; i just started writing fiction in fucking august 2022 and am having a FUCKING BALL learning by doing. so i googled reverse outline, read the top three hits lol, and was like OH FUCK YES. 

because i do not Outline-outline when i write. all respect to those who do!!!!!, but i just Can Not. i have tried, and i get both daunted and bored, and that combo is like fucking kryptonite to my brain. for a longer piece (or a piece that doesn’t just burst out of my fingertips in response to a gifset or bts drop or tweet or gc comment 😅), i do make a sort of vibes outline. like, i open a fresh doc and splort down all the themey ideas i’m able to put words to at that point, and i make notes on whatever beats have already formed in my head, but it’s loose and sketchy at best. and then i write and see what happens as the story unfolds, and i go back to that notes doc to sort of talk to myself about it, to update the vibe outline as i get further in my draft, etc. 

but PH6 is the longest & most complex thing i’ve written yet, so by the time i got to the end of the first draft—by the time i’d put the whole story into words—i was like, oh my god, what is this. like, has this done the thing i wanted to do, per my vibe outline, and also, what did it actually do, and is it legible (whatever that means; like far be it from me to tell the reader what they should get out of something, but, generally speaking, is it cohesive.). now that i have told the story, like… what the fuck is the story about please, and does it "work." 

so i “finished” my reverse outline yesterday and omfg it’s helping so much and it’s SO EXCITING!!!! LIKE, THIS IS HELPING ME WRAP MY MIND AROUND THE THING I DID, SO I AM BETTER ABLE TO SEE WHAT I AM TRYING TO DO!!!! AND I CAN WORK WITH THAT!!!!!

it’s like i had a bunch of kittens scrambling around in my brain and while i was writing i was like 'oh i love these kittens so much, and i really hope this story herds these kittens effectively so they slow down just enough that people can really see their cute little faces (including me, i am people)' and then i finished the first draft and was like 'ahhh did the story herd the kittens??? i can't tell, they're still moving too fast in my brain' and then the reverse outline showed up and was like I COME BEARING TUNA AND FIFTEEN CARDBOARD BOXES and now i can see the kittens better. 

and then! i slept on it last night, and this morning my brain was like, “oh, here, why don’t i just efficiently articulate the vibes and arrange them in a tidy visual diagram that reveals how they all flow through the story for you?” WHEE!!

and then i got so excited that i had to put it down and write all this instead of working on it further 

(this, which could probably use its own reverse outline lmao)

like, i’m reading Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey, which is a book of collected lectures that i cannot stop screaming about and that slaps so hard i keep having to throw it across the room, and just the other day i read, in the chapter “On Secrets,” 

I used to think I wrote because there was something I wanted to say. Then I thought, “I will continue to write because I have not yet said what I wanted to say”; but I know now I continue to write because I have not yet heard what I have been listening to.

and i think the reverse outline is helping me hear it a little better, and that is fucking exciting.

[aranarumei]

me trying to fully outline the rest of this fic: ok hear me out though. what if i reverse outlined ch 1 and by doing that stared at it so hard that i feel the need to line-edit it like crazy. what then.

[ebbpettier]

@artsyunderstudy and @imagineacoolusername thank you for the tags o7 (and anyone else who does, i'm just EARLY today)

i waffled a little bit about posting this, because when i write i'm like "fuck it, give away the ending, REVEAL THE ENTIRE PIECE", but when i'm drawing i seize up like a possum if anyone sees it before it's absolutely finished

and i'm trying not to do that! you would not believe how much stuff i draw but don't post because it doesn't meet my personal standard of stick-a-fork-in-it done-ness.

so here's one of my meme edits i'm trying to motivate myself to work on:

simon sunburn snow salisbury

@stitchyqueer @shrekgogurt @anybodyelsewhowantstoparticipate

TAG YOU'RE IT

[starlit-hopes-and-dreams]

[ID: Ch.23 (A) - Alaia is working at the festival with Warren. See effects of aura suppressant. Serin is delivered back, not in optimal condition. Alaia loses her shit. End ID]

Not in optimal condition? NOT IN OPTIMAL CONDITION?!

😅😂 I don't know what crack I was smoking, but that's the understatement of the century right there, folks.

Buried memories

Ffs.

[muse-write]

.

[asleepinawell]

had a dream that someone in a ffxiv raid told me to be an “anti-healer” which has just fed my craving for a necromancer healing job

abilities might include:

gauge fills as teammates take damage (true goth symbiosis with black mages)

pet can be summoned (zombie or skeleton or something). pet health can either be siphoned to a teammate (think faerie tether sort of idea), or pet melee attacks fill gauge

pet can be exploded for an aoe damage burst which fills gauge a chunk (emergency gauge fill for heals...sch has a similar thing with dismissing faerie). so the summon doesn’t have a time limit, but the pet can be sacrificed either by running out of health from siphoning or being exploded. there’s a cd for resummoning that starts at pet death

gauge is essentially ‘life energy’ that can be used for heals much like other healer gauges. maybe some extra benefit that fits aesthetically with necromancer

some large amount of gauge resource (maybe full bar?) allows for an instant rez of a teammate (basically free instant second rez when sc is on cd but at the cost of the instant heals from gauge)

i tried to think of a cool bonus for a teammate dying but i think that would just encourage the healers to let people die so that’s a no

lb3 summons a huge zombie or revenant type thing that blows up or turns into a hundred shades or something. it’s awesome and no one cans see anything on their screen for the duration. goth verblind