Episode Forty: Why Pantsers NEED Outlines (Just Not When You Think)
Dear Pantsers, if you think that you’re allergic to all outlines, think again. Pantsers can still use outlines, just not for planning their stories.
Instead, I teach pantsers to use outlines in revision. A reverse outline specifically.
Listen to episode 40 for all the ways that pantsers can use reverse outlines to get clarity on their stories and plan their revisions before rewriting their full draft 10,000 times.
And if you want to learn even more from me, join me for the Revision Kickstart Challenge!
This free 3-day event runs from September 22nd - 24th!
Over those 3 days, I’ll teach you how to set yourself up for success, set a vision for your book, and prepare for the revision work ahead.
Plus, there just might be some fun prizes available!
Get the full details and register for the challenge at OHWRevisionClass.com!
I can’t wait to see you live and help you write a better book!!
You can listen in your favorite podcast player here or watch on YouTube here.
Thanks for listening, keep writing, and keep getting better one word at a time!
Transcript
Please Note: This transcript was automatically generated and only lightly edited.
Olivia (00:00)
If you identify as a pantser, you might think that you have gotten out of outlining for life. But today I'm going to argue that pantsers need outlines just as much as botters do. But we use them at a different point in the writing process, because we use them after the draft is done instead of using them before it's written. Alright, before you shut me down and ignore what comes next, stick around because I'm going to explain how a reverse outline, that outline you create after your draft, can save you so much heartache and misery in the revision process, even and especially if you're a pantser. Let's get started.
Welcome to episode 40 of the Better Writer Podcast. This podcast is officially over the hill and I am so excited to hit this milestone. Today I'm talking about one of my favorite topics, how pantsers can unlock their revision process with a reverse outline. And like I said at the beginning, if you are a pantser and you just feel like you're allergic to outlines, they will never work for you. I'm hoping to change your mind today. All right, before I go any further, I have to tell you about a free event that I am running September 22nd through the 24th.
It's called the Revision Kickstart Challenge, and I'm going to spend three days with you live getting you ready to revise with confidence. We are going to talk about setting a vision so you know exactly what you're trying to create.
We'll talk about how to create a revision process that isn't overwhelming and the pitfalls that you should look out for that get other writers stuck. We're also going to take action. You are going to make sure that you understand what your book needs to do to be successful. And I hope that by the end of those three days, you are ready to revise with confidence, not overwhelm.
Again, this event is free. It's live. We'll be meeting every day from the 22nd to the 24th at 3 30 p.m. Eastern. But if that time doesn't work for you, don't worry. Replays are going to be posted as soon as we're done each day.
If you are ready to register and kickstart your revisions, go to OHWRevisionClass.com and that link is going to be wherever you're watching or listening to the show. I can't wait to see you there and help you create a book you're proud to share with the world.
All right, now let's get started with today's topic: why pantsers still need outlines, and specifically why they need outlines for revision. All right, to start, I want to talk about what a reverse outline is, just in case you haven't heard this term, even though we probably talk about reverse outlining every other week, if not every week. a reverse outline is at a basic level, an outline of your story that you create after the draft is finished. So instead of using that outline to plan, you are using that outline to simply capture what is already there on the page. It is essentially a summary of your story and that could be in bullet point format where you might have a bullet point for every scene or chapter. You can use a book map, which is essentially a spreadsheet where every scene or chapter gets summarized in one line of the spreadsheet. Or you could use any other format that works for you. Whether that is a plotter outline, it could be a grid outline in Dabble or any other software I'm sure Scrivener also has an outline option.
It really does not matter what you use. I only recommend that you may use something digital so you can edit it and I'll talk about why that is a little bit later. But essentially, you are taking your story and summarizing it. I recommend doing that by just skimming through your draft and summarizing as you go, but it's something you could also do as you're writing if you wanted to get a head start on this process and just document what you write every day, every week, whatever it is.
All right, that's our basic definition. You are working with a summary of your story. And again, this is something you're creating after the draft is done, after you have already done the writing, you are not using this outline to plan. I am not trying to change your pantser identity or get you to plan in advance if that does not work for you. There are so many reasons why someone may not have an outline to start, or you might be someone who started with an outline and then threw it out halfway through. I still consider you to be a pantser, or maybe you're somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, but if you deviated from your outline, if you are a pantser who did not have an outline to start with, your draft is likelier on the messier side, and that means a reverse outline is going to be so, so helpful in revision.
All right, let's talk about how the outline actually helps you. First off, a reverse outline is going to give you a way to see your entire plot in a condensed, easy-to-access format. And I just want you to think about what your draft looks like when you are done drafting with that first draft. It's a little messy. And if you just sit down and try to make sense of it, starting on page one, reading through until the end.
Most likely one of two things is going to happen. Either you are going to completely lose sight of the plot because you are going to be focused on all of the awkward things that are happening at a scene or line level. Because we know that that is how first drafts are. There are going to be errors that are so ridiculous and obvious that you're going to wonder how you ever typed that. There are going to be descriptions that make no sense. There are going to be chapters that go nowhere, scenes that just die halfway through. And all of that is fine.
All of that is completely normal for a first draft. Those are all things that we are going to want to tackle in revision, but they are not the first thing that we want to tackle. And especially when it comes to those awkward typos, weird phrasings, things like that, those are line editing problems. Those are not developmental issues that we need to worry about right off the bat.
When you're revising your first draft, you really want to focus on plot level stuff, conflict, character arcs, structure, all those high-level things that need to be solid before we start polishing or rewriting anything at the scene or line level. And when you are dealing with a messy draft, it can be so easy to get bogged down in those scene or line level things and completely miss out on the structural issues that actually make a huge difference to readers that actually need to be tackled and addressed first. And the beautiful, beautiful thing about a reverse outline is that it's going to give you so much clarity on those high level things because you're no longer trying to hold your entire plot in your head. You're no longer trying to hold the character arc in your brain as you go chapter by chapter. You have the whole thing laid out for you, summarized, in five pages or 10 pages instead of 500. And that is so much more accessible.
It's also just more clear because you're gonna see, okay, character A does not change from scene one to scene 50. And then all of a sudden in scene 51, they are a completely different change person, and there's no reason for that. That is gonna jump out at you in an outline in a way that it just won't if you're just reading chapters one through 50 and then get to chapter 51. maybe you're gonna realize it then, but it's also quite possible that you are just not even gonna realize what has been happening because you're not reading those chapters straight through.
And the same thing is true for structure. It's going to be so much more obvious when your inciting incident shows up in the middle of your outline, whereas you might not notice that as much if you're just looking at your draft. obviously, those are two extreme examples that might pop out at you, but they're going to look and feel very different in an outline versus if you are just reading through your draft and you are noticing those structural issues, but also every other thing that is going on in your story. And I think it's also a lot easier to be objective about things that are happening in our manuscript when we're looking at the outline and we realize that, okay, we have 50 bullet points. The inciting incident is happening at bullet point 26, versus if we are in the scene and we're like, I really love this party scene and this random scene and this other scene. I love this description. There might be things you love in scenes that actually don't belong in your story, and it can be really hard to look past that if you're just reading your draft chapter by chapter and trying to make revision decisions at the same time.
So the number one thing that a reverse outline does for you is give you clarity. It allows you to see your entire story in that condensed format so that we can focus on plot, structure, conflict, character arcs, those big high-level things that are so important to get right, but are also really hard to see if you're just reading page by page. The other thing that a reverse outline does, which is very closely related, is that it allows you to ignore all of the editing tasks that need to be done. I mentioned this briefly when I said that when you have a reverse outline, you're not going to be able to see the descriptions, the awkward phrasing, the typos, those random grammar issues that you swear you knew better, and then somehow they ended up in your draft anyway.
And those things are super important to edit at some point, but that is far, far down the road. That is not a first draft revision task. Revision is high level. It is conflict, character arcs, making sure all of your scenes belong. Then once we get a couple steps down the road, then we line edit , then we go find all those typos, then we make sure the grammar is perfect. But that's not a first draft task. And if you start there, you are going to end up wasting your time. And maybe, maybe you are going to miraculously have created a structurally sound, perfect first draft that only needs grammar edits, but I highly, highly, highly, highly doubt it. more likely you are going to have scenes that don't belong, or scenes that need to be completely rewritten, or character arcs that go nowhere and need more scenes to flesh them out. There are so many things that we need to do to get a first draft to even second draft level that you are going to end up wasting time if you polish your first draft because you are going to polish words that get deleted, that get completely changed, that don't belong in the actual story.
And if you are polishing your first draft, you are either setting yourself up for a lot of repeated work or you are going to create a situation where you no longer have the motivation to rewrite those things because you've already cleaned them up. So we don't want either of those things to happen because either way you're wasting time and especially that second option can lead to you completely giving up on your book, or you try to query or publish a book that is coherent in terms of the line level writing, but completely structurally unsound and that is going to just lead to failure, rejection, et cetera. And we don't want that. We don't want that to happen.
So we really need a process that is going to allow us to focus on the first things first. And a reverse outline is a great way to force yourself to do that because it removes the descriptions, the actual line level writing from the equation altogether. All you're looking at is the outline. All you're looking at is a summary. We are completely focused on the things that we can analyze from that format. And everything else gets pushed to the side.
All right. The next thing that a reverse outline is going to do for you is it's going to give you clarity on what is happening at a high level in your plot. I already kind of touched on this, but I think it's really important to note that there are certain things in your story that are just going to jump out at you in a summary so much more than they do in a full draft. And people will even say that they started writing a synopsis so they could query their story, and that's when they realized that they had a major plot hole.
Or they, you know, they had to explain their story to someone else. And that is when they realized that there was this huge flaw in their story that they didn't even see when they were looking at the full draft version. And that is because summaries are illuminating. When we strip out all the pretty things and all the scenes and all the fun stuff and just have the you know, spine of the story, just have what is happening at a high level, so many things become clear.
And I think just the act of creating a reverse outline and realizing that you put X and Y next to each other in the story can give you some insight into what is going on and can help you see things that you didn't notice as you were writing the whole story. And that is a great start. But it also gives us an opportunity to then analyze those things in a deeper way. It is so much easier to run through a series of bullet points to see do I have conflict in every scene? Is that conflict escalating in a logical way? And we can look at characters. We can see how is this character changing little by little? Where do we see them making different decisions, better decisions, worse decisions if it's a fall arc. Those things are going to be easier to see in a bullet point than again over the course of the whole draft when you were trying to hold the story in your head.
And then there is the final thing that you can do with the reverse outline, which honestly I think is the most magical of them all. It is what I teach when I'm teaching revision in my course, Reader Ready Revisions. And it is what I recommend to everyone who has a messy draft. And that is that you can revise the reverse outline first. Test out your edits in the reverse outline before you do anything else. And the reason why this is so magical is because you are going to save yourself so much time by editing that condensed shortened format, deciding on the major changes that you want to make, and then checking to see if that breaks something else in your plot before you go and rewrite hundreds of words of your story.
For example, if you realize that your quest plot is repetitive. Your characters are doing the same thing over and over and over again, even though they're in different locations. Maybe they're facing different monsters, but ultimately all of those different monster fight scenes feel the same. Let's say that you are revising your whole draft at the same time. You're rewriting each of those fight scenes in isolation. Maybe with the first two parts of the quest plot, you find really different ways for them to battle the monsters. But then by the time we get to plot point number seven, which is our seventh monster battle, you go back and you repeat something that you had just rewritten in a different scene, or you make everything so different that it now no longer makes any sense whatsoever. You could have avoided that by just planning your changes to those fight scenes in isolation. So that instead of doing those changes over 10 days, 10 weeks, however long it takes you to revise your full draft, you're doing it in maybe 20 minutes.
You're just rewriting those plot points. Literally, it could be 10 minutes. So you just say, okay, fight number one is going to be this, and then this, and then this, and then this. And then you can check them to make sure that you haven't introduced new redundancies or new repetitions, to make sure that there is a logical escalation to the whole thing. this is also a good opportunity to make sure that there are logical goals guiding that entire quest, that the characters are changing in appropriate ways along the journey.
And maybe it takes you 30 minutes to revise that section of your outline instead of again trying to rewrite hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of words to fully change that quest plot. You've now spent 10 minutes editing some bullet points versus so much time editing the full draft. And if you decide that you hate your changes, you can redo them in another 10, 20 minutes versus having to rewrite thousands of words again over several weeks or months or however long it takes you to write.
The point is that no matter how fast or slow you write, you're gonna be faster revising 10 pages versus 500. That is just logically how it works. And you might not land on the perfect edits right away, and that's okay because you can test your outline, test edits in your outline hundreds of times, probably before you reach the same amount of time it would take you to make one round of revisions in your manuscript. And that is why I love reverse outlining. Because you can change your entire plot 25 times and still have saved time because you're only editing the outline.
And that gives you time and space and honestly, kind of the mental freedom to find the revisions that are truly going to make your story better before you start rewriting. So you don't have to guess, you don't have to second guess. You don't have to spiral trying to figure out the perfect solution for chapter 50, when you don't even know what's gonna happen in the next chapter after that, we can tackle all of it at once, get super clear on where we're going with the story as a whole, make sure everything in the plot and structure and character arcs and conflict are solid, then we start rewriting. And the final thing that that reverse outline is going to do is it's going to become your revision checklist. Once you have planned all of your edits, you can now go through one by one checking off those boxes.
And you can do them in any order that you want. You can chase your energy or your interest everywhere in the manuscript. You can bounce around because you've already made the plan. You don't have to worry about breaking something earlier in your story or later in the story because you've already made the plan. And if a new idea comes to you, guess what? You can go back, spend another 20, 30 minutes revising your outline again. And we keep going off to the races. And that I think is the real power of a reverse outline. It's not just about summarizing your story. And I talked in last week's episode about how reverse outlining doesn't actually work just by itself.
The reverse outline is a tool. It's all about how you use it. And that is the magic when you can sit down and edit your entire story in 20 minutes instead of 20 hours or you know, more. Obviously, I'm just making up numbers at this point. but it makes you more efficient, it makes it easier to see the entire story, it makes it easier to hold the story in your head, it makes it easier to address those structural issues that quite honestly plague pantsers because we don't start off with a plan. If you don't have a structure in place before you start writing, you have to do it on the back end. And the best way that I have found to do that is with a reverse outline because it's going to allow you to test changes that are going to require thousands of words of rewriting. Let's not beat around the bush. It's true. As a pantser, you most likely will need to rewrite every word in your story at least once. But let's plan that rewrite before we jump in. Let's not rewrite it 20 times so we could do it one time.
All right. Plan your changes in a reverse outline then we go and rewrite the best version of our story, or at least the second draft best version. Then we'll jump into line edits and making everything stronger at the page level after that. All right, I hope I've convinced you that reverse outlining is the best way for pantsers to gain control of a messy draft and revise a version of their story that works for readers and a version of their story that they can be proud to share with the world.
Because I know if you're a pantser, or anyone who has thrown the outline out along the way, or even if you're just a beginner writer who wasn't even sure how to create a good outline from the start, you have looked at your draft and you have seen something that you are ashamed of. You have seen something that does not work for you, for readers, for anyone else. So you don't even want your best friend to see. And I want you to hear right now, that is not the end of your story. That is not where your draft is going to end up. You can write an amazing book. That book right there, that is a complete mess right now, can be amazing.
I recommend starting with a reverse outline. Take the emotion out of it. Stop looking at your weird, messed up sentences, and just focus on the plot in isolation through that reverse outline. Then let's figure out what's working, what's not working, what we need to change. Plan those changes in that condensed, accessible format. Then go back and rewrite your story and create the better version, the second draft, the version that you are gonna keep improving and improving until it is ready for readers, until you are proud to share it with your best friend and the whole world and everyone else.
All right. Thank you so so much for listening to another episode of the Better Writer Podcast. I hope this was helpful. And if you want to keep learning from me, if you are ready to actually jumpstart your revisions and figure out how to make this process work for you, please, please, please come to my free revision kickstart challenge. Three days live on Zoom. I'm going to help you get ready to revise with confidence, with clarity.
And we are going to banish overwhelm. That's my goal for those three days. You are going to feel so ready to jump in and make your draft the best it can be. And again, this event is completely free. So I hope you'll join me September 22nd through the 24th. All the information you need is at OHWRevisionClass.com And that link is wherever you are listening to or watching this show. All right. Thank you again for joining me for this episode. Have a wonderful week. Keep writing. Keep getting better. One word at a time. See ya.
