Episode Twenty-Five: How a Reverse Outline Can Help Fiction Writers Revise Their Novels (Copy)
What do you think of when you think of revising your novel? Do you imagine diving in to your novel and starting to make changes on the page?
That’s an important step, but there are actually three whole steps that come first. Why? Because planning ahead of time means you’re more likely to revise strategically, not haphazardly.
Here are the three steps that need to come first:
Visualize your finished book so you have a destination for your revisions.
Analyze your draft so you know exactly what needs work.
Strategize your revisions so you can choose solutions that will make the entire book better, not just parts of it.
Sign up for my FREE revision masterclass and finally finish your book. You can learn more about the class here: https://ohwrevisionclass.com/
Ready to register? Choose your session and sign up here:
Wednesday, May 20th: https://olivia-helps-writers.kit.com/masterclass-may20
Thursday, May 21st: https://olivia-helps-writers.kit.com/masterclass-may21
Saturday, May 23rd: https://olivia-helps-writers.kit.com/masterclass-may23
Tuesday, May 26th: https://olivia-helps-writers.kit.com/masterclass-may26
Can’t make any of them? Register anyway and I’ll send you the replay as soon as we’re done!
If you show up live OR watch the replay within 24 hours, you’ll get my book map template for free! I’ll see you there!
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Thanks for listening, keep writing, and keep getting better one word at a time!
Transcript
Olivia Bedford (00:00)
There is a quote attributed to Albert Einstein that says, It's not 100 % certain he said that because back in the day there was no video, they were just writing things down. But I love this quote and I think it ties in to the idea of revising a novel so perfectly. I have said it before and I will say it again. 90 % of the work in a successful revision happens before you have touched a single word in your novel. That means before you actually rewrite the thing, you have to plan your revision. So you have to think about what actually needs to be revised and you need to take a step back even further and actually decide where you're trying to go with that revision. It's a lot of pre-work, but it's important and that's what we're gonna talk about today. Let's dive in.
Real quick before I jump into the content of today's show, I wanted to remind everyone that I am running a free master class called Finally Finish Your Book, Stop Making the Five Revision Mistakes Keeping Your Story Stuck. Again, this class is 100 % free. And if you're listening to the show, when it comes out, the first session is tomorrow, Wednesday, May 20th. There are gonna be three sessions after that on May 21st, May 23rd, which is a Saturday for all my people who can never come on weekdays and then the final session will be on May 26th. So check out the link wherever you are listening to the show. Those sessions are at different times. I'm trying to be as accommodating as I can for time zones. But if none of those times work for you, don't worry. I will be sending out a replay as soon as the session ends. So sign up for whichever one works for you. And if you happen to show up live or watch the replay within 24 hours, I will send you my book map template for free. It is the same template that I use to create book maps for my clients and it's one that I give out to students in my course, Reader Ready Revisions, but all you need to do to get it is show up or, again, watch the replay within 24 hours and you will get that for free. So again, the class is called Finally Finish Your Book. It is all about the mistakes that I see people making in revision and ways to sure they don't get you stuck so that you can keep moving forward with your novel and finally finish your book.
All right, now onto today's episode. I am talking all about the pre-work of revision. And I think sometimes people just think that the pre-work of revision is writing the draft, that as soon as you reach the end, you are ready to go back to page one and just start making changes. And unfortunately, that's not how it works. That is not a recipe for a strategic successful revision. If you do that, if you just go back to page one and start making changes based on what you see on just page one, you are most likely going to make unstrategic changes. You are going to tweak a line of dialogue. You are going to start correcting typos. You are going to start debating whether your main character's eyes are sky blue or dark blue. And all of those things are important. Even the eye color might be really important to you.
All of those things are important, but they are not revision. They are not the work that you need to be doing once you have finished your first draft. All of those things should come later in the process. Those are draft three problems or draft four problems, or maybe if you write really clean, maybe that is something that you were going to address in your second round of revision already, but for a lot of us, it's actually going to take multiple rounds of fixes before we get to that nitty gritty stuff, and that's okay as long as we are being strategic and actually addressing the things that we need to address at each stage in the revision process. So what does that actually look like? What do we actually need to do before we start rewriting our story? And just to be clear, in my mind, all of the stuff that I'm going to talk about today is revision. But I'm specifically going to be talking about the things that you need to do before you start actually rewriting, before you start making changes on the page. Because I think for a lot of us, that's what we think of as revision, is the actual action of I am making changes to my story. So in my mind, again, everything I'm talking about today is part of the revision process. But for you, you might be thinking revision is just the rewriting. And I'm gonna be talking about the steps that come before. And all of this is based on my Reader Ready revision method, which is what I teach in my course, Reader Ready Revisions. It is essentially what I do behind the scenes as a developmental editor when I'm working on a client manuscript. But today just wanna talk about the first three steps in the process, the ones that happen before we actually start rewriting. And just to give you an idea of the process as a whole, there are four steps in the Reader Ready revision method. Step one, visualize your finished book to know where you're going in your revisions. Step two,
Analyze your draft so you know what actually needs to be revised. Step three, strategize revisions so you have a plan. And then finally, step four is when you actually revise the manuscript. And again, that is what most people think of as revision. They want to jump right in and start rewriting when there are actually three whole steps that need to come before that. And this is one of the biggest mistakes that I see writers making. And I totally understand where this comes from because rewriting feels productive. It feels like the work.
It feels like you are moving forward and making progress, especially if you are adding new words or you're really getting in there and you can see that you are making changes, you are fixing typos, your sentences are getting better, and all of those things. Once again, they are important. They are not revision. That's editing. Editing is important. Editing is the next step after we revise, but revision is not tweaking a color or making a description sharper.
Revision is making sure that your story works for readers at a holistic level. All right, I'm getting ahead of myself, but ⁓ three of those steps in the revision process need to happen outside of your draft. You need to step back and actually figure out what do you need to revise? And the first step is to figure out what you want your book to be. You might already have a really clear sense coming from the drafting process, but your initial idea might not be where you are now having actually finished that draft. And I see this all the time, where people think they were writing one genre or when they started the drafting process, they didn't even really know what genres were out there and they just picked one that they were familiar with that actually never applied to what they were writing. So it might seem really simple. You might say, of course I know what I want my book to be. It's a romance, it's a fantasy, it is epic fantasy it's whatever. It might not be, especially as you start to learn more about the market and more about subgenres and more about those different categories that are available to you, what you think is epic fantasy might actually fit more comfortably somewhere else. And those are things that we can figure out before we start revising so that we can intentionally move toward the category that you want to claim. And it's not just genre, I talk about genre so much, but you also need to figure out who are you writing for? Who is your ideal reader? For example, if you're writing romance, you might be deciding, am I writing closed door? Am I going to make it spicy? Because that is going to really determine who your audience is. There's obviously overlap. I personally am someone I will read things that are at the mild end of the spectrum and I will go all the way to five chili peppers and above. I am very flexible in that regard. Not everyone is. Some people only want spicy books and some people only want books that are not spicy and both are valid, but you need to write for one category of people.
And then the people like me who are ambidextrous when it comes to spice, don't think that word's actually supposed use that way, but who cares? They will find you regardless, but you really need to focus on who are your ideal readers are in that regard. And of course, there are so many other categories. We can think about age. Sometimes gender is relevant, sometimes it isn't. You can also think about political leanings, religion. There are all kinds of different categories. Some of them will apply to your book. Some of them won't. And that's also something that you need to figure out is does your genre have certain subcategories that you are going to pick and choose your way into depending on those themes or not. ⁓ Again, it is just going to vary depending on what you're writing, but you need to know that. And this is where you figure that out so you can make strategic choices for the story you're trying to tell for the people you're trying to reach.
And all of that information is going to turn into action because what you're really trying to figure out with this step is what job your book needs to do or what jobs it needs to do. You are looking at your genre, who you're writing for, what you want to accomplish, the point that you're trying to get across.
You are thinking about your own artistic ambitions, if that is how you think about your work. And all of that is coming together to form the job that your book needs to do. What does it need to make readers experience or feel or think? That is what you are then going to make sure you're accomplishing when we get to step two, which is when you analyze your draft. As I already said, revision is big picture, which means you need to look at how your book is working as a whole. That doesn't mean, is page one exciting?
That's an important question for editing. When we are thinking about revision, we need to figure out, am I starting my story in the right place? Is this the right opening for this story, this genre, this reader? You need to ask yourself, is my structure working? Is my conflict working? Do I have a character arc? Do I need a character arc? Is my world building working at a fundamental level? Does it make sense? Those are all questions that we need to look at in the context of your draft as it is right now.
For me, that analysis needs to happen before you are actively making changes. So you need to stop, take a step back. You need to read your entire draft. If it is clean enough for you to do that without totally losing all hope, ⁓ my preferred method is to create a reverse outline, which means you are just skimming your draft, summarizing it, and then we work from the summary because that summary is going to be so telling. It is going to show you what your conflicts actually look like when you strip them back. Is there a clear escalation? Are your conflicts logical?
You are going to be able to see your structure because it will be simplified and laid out in front of you. And you can see that actually your midpoint doesn't happen until the last page. And then you are rushing the resolution. Obviously that's extreme, but you might have a situation where you have a subplot that you realize has taken over 40 % of your book. I have had that happen to a client and I told her to cut 40,000 words and she, well, I didn't tell her, I suggested and she did and she agreed with me. But it was painful. But those are things that we can see in a reverse outline. In addition, we can see is your character actually developing on the page? You know you want them to have an arc, but are the key points in that arc actually happening or not? We can tell that with a reverse outline. There is so much that we can see just in that simplified snapshot of your story, and it sets you up perfectly for step three, which is when you actually start strategizing your revisions. And I've gotten some questions on why these two steps are separate. Why do we analyze and then strategize?
And in my mind, you need to know all of what's going on before you can choose the right solutions. And that is why in my course, I lead you through a step-by-step process where we first analyze all facets of our manuscript, then we go into the next module, and that is where we actually make decisions about the changes that you're going to make. And ultimately, the reason I do that, the reason why I think it is so important to separate them is because your novel is complex and every element is interrelated.
You cannot have conflict without characters. You cannot have characters without a world for them to live in. You cannot have structure without scenes and the conflict within them. All of it is working together, or not. And you need to figure out what is working, what isn't. How can we make the whole thing stronger? And just to give you an example, imagine you are writing a middle grade fantasy novel. Your main character is a wizard at wizard school. And let's say that as you're analyzing a reverse outline, you figure out that there isn't enough conflict. The conflict peters out. It feels really low stakes. There's nothing to keep readers hooked from beginning to end. A very common problem. I think I talk about conflict in almost every editorial letter I have ever written. I've worked with over 50 different writers at this point, over 50 manuscripts that I've looked at, almost every single one had problems with conflict because it's hard. It's hard to get it right. So let's imagine you find a conflict issue. is not going far enough. It is not logical, whatever. And then you also realize that your character doesn't have a clear arc. They're not changing in any meaningful way. And you realize that for your target audience of young readers, we really need this character to change because that is the job that your book needs to do. So there are different paths that we could then take. Let's say that you go to the option of handling those two issues separately. We are just going to think about conflict and we're just going to think about character change. So you could start off by saying, I'm going to add conflict by introducing demons. Demons are going to attack this character's school and this character is going to have to fight demons. This character also has a favorite teacher. That favorite teacher is going to sacrifice themselves for the main character and they are going to basically knock the main character out of the battle completely. Main character is safe, done, they survive. The favorite teacher character who sacrificed themselves does not. ⁓ Then you say separately from that, I'm gonna also have a character arc in which the main character has to learn to trust themselves.
And the climax of that plot is going to be the main character participating in the wizardly talent show. They are going to perform, it's going to be great. And then the next day, demons are going to come and ruin everything. There are two different stories in which those two plots could work. On one hand, we have the demon attack. On the other hand, we have the talent show. That's great. There are versions of both of those stories that could work. But as you can kind of see how they don't quite come together the emotional plot is climaxing with the talent show and has nothing to do with the demon attack that follows, you're not going to create a cohesive, satisfying experience for your characters. Versus if we decide that those two things are going to work together. Your main character has to learn to trust themselves so they can fight demons. And let's say that all throughout the story, they are struggling with their magic, they are struggling to trust themselves with magic and they go to demon battles one-on-one class and they can't do it. They can't do even the most basic spells because they don't have faith in themselves. They are embarrassed. And maybe parallel to that, they are also trying to hone their talent in some other way. Their friend convinces them to be in the talent show, you know, whatever it may be. And they finally started building it. So on one hand, they are feeling totally inadequate when it comes to fighting demons, but they're starting to build their confidence as a singer, let's say.
And those two things are happening parallel. And then we get to the talent show. They are just about to take the stage. They're nervous, but they are, you know, cultivating that little bit of belief in themselves they're going to reform. And then the demons attack the talent show. And then we have to fight. And finally, we are able to use that spell from demon class 101, whatever it is. Obviously, I'm making this example up, it is very rough, but the key point here is that when we get to the climax, demons attack the school. know, totals I know, the demon part should also be foreshadowed at the very least or set up, or we should see demons getting closer and closer, whatever it is. ⁓ We want those two things to come together. Your main external plot and your character arc come together. They are not functioning separately. They are not developing separately. ⁓ They might be represented in different facets of your character's life, we can have that talent show subplot and see that character developing confidence in a different part of their life, and then see that confidence bleed over into their magic just a little bit. And then the talent show is interrupted by the demon attack, and then your main character, maybe their mentor, their favorite teacher still sacrifices themselves, but then your character steps up, they believe in themselves, and they are the one who defeats the demons at the end of the day. ⁓ We want those two things to come together.
We want them to work together. We want them to amplify each other. And you do that by choosing revisions that are going to address both at the same time. We create the character arc in the context of the conflict that we are escalating in the story. We create more conflict related to your character arc and use those moments of conflict to demonstrate the ways that your character is changing little by little until we get to the climax and that change is cemented.
Of course, that is one example. There are many different ways that you could accomplish those goals of having a character arc and more conflict. There are infinite possibilities because there are infinite stories out there that can be created. And you may have heard that there are only seven stories out there. That is referring to, you know, very basic structure. You have infinite possibilities when it comes to your characters, your world, the specific things that are happening in that context.
And that's one the beautiful things about writing and creativity is that there are so many possibilities and it isn't one size fits all. Which I think is something that I really, really try to emphasize that revision is not about taking all of the pithy, overly simplistic advice out there and simply shoving it into your manuscript wherever you can. It's about figuring out what you want to create? Where are you falling short of that personal vision? What do you need to do to close the gap? And that's going to be specific to you and your story.
All right, so that was your introduction to the first three steps in my Reader Ready revision method. And ultimately, this method is all about helping you create a book that works for you, the book that you have been dreaming of creating, not just applying generic writing advice and shoving it into your manuscript. If this episode was helpful, I am running a free masterclass where I'm going to be sharing more of the mistakes that I see writers making as an editor and book coach. And I'm not just going to be sharing what people are doing wrong. I'm also going to talk about ways that you can avoid those mistakes in your own writing or stop making them if they have been keeping you stuck. Again, this class is 100 % free. I'm running multiple sessions and a replay will be sent out as soon as we are done. So if you are interested in revising with confidence and clarity and finally creating the book that you have been dreaming of creating, sign up for that free class. The link will be wherever you are watching or listening to the show. And of course, if you are joining me from the future when this class has already come and gone, don't worry. The link will redirect to whatever I'm offering at that moment in the future. Even if you're listening to this in the future, I will still be here still helping writers.
Thank you so, so much for listening to another episode of the Better Writer Podcast. If this episode helped you in any way, please, please consider sharing it with a friend who needs to hear this as well.
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