Outlining in Reverse
By AARON HAMBURGER
Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.
FROM: THE NEW YORK TIMES, JANUARY 21, 2013
In my experience, one of the surest ways to kill the creative
energy of a work of fiction at its inception is with an outline.
The very word takes me back to fourth-grade English class,
with all those confusing Roman numerals and capital letters.
During my early years as a writer I dutifully worked with the
outlines of my youth. However, the longer I wrote, the more
loose the structure of those outlines became. The numbers
and letters gradually transformed into bulleted key words or
bolded phrases, little Hansel and Gretel bread crumbs I left
for myself to find and expand during revision. Later on, I
wrote in stages, first blocking out the general parameters of
my piece, then going back to fill in the details. It’s much the
same way a figure sculptor begins by carving into a hunk of
raw clay with broad strokes to determine the proportions of
the limbs before going into muscles, veins and fingernails.
Over the course of my 17-year writing career, I began to give
up on outlining — that is, before I write. I’ve come to prefer a
more organic approach to creation, first laying out my raw
material on the page, then searching for possible patterns that
might emerge. But now,after I’ve completed a first draft, I
compose an outline. I’ve found that this is the surest way to
make sense of the work. I originally thought I was a genius for
having invented reverse outlining, but I’ve since learned that
many writers do this in some form or another.
I started using this technique while working on my first story
collection. I knew that I tended to write long stories, but I had
a hard time finding which parts of my material were
superfluous. This was especially apparent during the
immediate aftermath of the heat and light of creation. Every
paragraph I wrote seemed not only relevant but also brilliant.
For that reason, I relied on friends, fellow writers, even my
agent, to help me locate the “flab” in my work.
My inability to self-edit became an acute problem when I was
invited to give a public reading and forced to stick to a time
limit. Unfortunately, I’d exhausted my network of
nonprofessional and professional editors with various drafts
of my work. This was a puzzle I’d have to solve on my own.
While staring at my stories for what seemed like the
hundredth time, I decided to analyze them scene by scene,
taking note of how many pages each one lasted, as well as how
much of the piece was devoted to action and different
characters. The math turned out to be inexorably honest.
In some stories, I was embarrassed by how long I’d taken to
set up my central conflict, as well as how little time I’d spent
on some of the most crucial emotional moments. In other
stories, I found that most of the scenes were roughly equal in
length, and so cutting became as easy as an across-the-board
budget cut. I dared myself to try to cut 10 percent from each
scene, and then assessed what was left. Happily, I didn’t
always achieve my goal — because let’s face it, writing is not
math and never should be. Yet what I learned about my story
along the way proved invaluable.
While I worked on my novel, my outline took a slightly
different form. The events in the book spanned a long
weekend, Friday to Monday, so I created a plot calendar,
noting which scenes and chapters took place on which day. I
was shocked to discover that (a) half my novel was taking
place on Friday night, and (b) I had skipped all of Saturday
entirely, as if it had never happened. Of course, there might
well be good reasons to make either of these choices, but only
if they were made consciously, which these ones clearly had
not been.
Reverse outlining can even prove helpful in writing essays like
this one. Introduction with hook: two paragraphs. Intro of
main idea: one paragraph. Experience with story collection:
four paragraphs. Experience with novel: one paragraph.
Wow, didn’t realize I’d spent that much longer on the stories
than on the novel until just now.
As with any good tool, there is a limit to the use of reverse
outlining and a danger of its abuse. Reducing a process as
intuitive and sometimes emotional as writing to the
objectivity of solving a mathematical equation isn’t always
helpful or desirable. Why did I spend four paragraphs of this
piece on my stories and only one on my novel? Well, because
that’s what I had to say about each one. It felt right at the
time, and the decision still feels right. I’m not going to add an
extra paragraph or two about writing my novel just to even up
the score, so to speak.
And yet, given that writing is often such a subjective,
emotionally driven process, I find it comforting when I
stumble into areas of absolutes (relatively speaking), like
grammar or punctuation.
It’s nearly impossible to take a clearsighted view of your own
work, since you’re reading not only the words that have fallen
on the page but also adding to them the so-called brilliant
ideas in your head, some of which never quite escape that
lofty domain. When you don’t have a second pair of eyes
nearby that can give you a sense of what you’ve done,
sometimes it helps to trick yourself into seeing your work in a
new light, by printing it out, changing your font, reading your
work out loud.
Or perhaps by trying a little math.
Reverse Outlining from the Writing Studio at Duke University
What is a reverse outline?
Reverse outlining is the Swiss army knife of revising. Through this process, you can
identify problems with your claims, the structure of your paper, and the organization
of your paragraphs.
We usually think of outlines as something we write before we write a paper—that is, if
we write one at all. However, a reverse outline gets its name by being written after the
paper it outlines. Whereas a regular outline is a tool to help organize your thoughts
before you begin to compose, a reverse outline is a way of revealing how you
organized your thoughts while you wrote. If you are concerned that your paper might
not be saying what you think it is saying, that your main ideas aren’t really coming
across, or that your paper might seem scattered or incoherent, a reverse outline is a
great way to begin the revision process.
How do I make a reverse outline?
As you read through your essay, write the main thought or thoughts of each paragraph
in order on a separate sheet or, alternatively, in the left margin next to the paragraph. In
essence, you are trying to turn your essay into a list of bullet points, listing the point
each paragraph is trying to deal with without getting into your argument or reasoning.
Your final product should look something like this:
Claim: Deinstitutionalizing mental patients in the late twentieth-century
led to transforming the “hobo” to the “homeless person.”
Paragraph 1: Introduction
Paragraph 2: The image of the hobo before
World War II Paragraph 3: The image of
the homeless person today Paragraph 4:
The effects of deinstitutionalization
Paragraph 5: A history of
deinstitutionalization
Paragraph 6: A history of the depression; how the depression is both
different and similar to the time period of deinstitutionalization; incorrect
beliefs about the causes and timeframe of deinstitutionalization
Paragraph 7: The Reagan administration’s policies on deinstitutionalization
Paragraph 8: The realities of life as a “homeless person” contrasted to
the romantic notions of “riding the rails.”
Paragraph 9: Conclusion
If you find yourself having problems summing up the main ideas of a paragraph in one
or two sentences, you probably have too many ideas in that paragraph; try splitting it
into two or more paragraphs.
Alternately, sometimes summarizing a paragraph can be difficult because it contains
too few ideas; if your paragraph has no unifying point, your summary of it won’t be
able to articulate that point. In that case, reconsider why you included the paragraph
in the first place.
Now that I have a reverse outline, what do I do with it?
Look carefully at your outline, considering both your organization and your main
claim. Does each paragraph support your claim, or do you have one or two that
contain extraneous information? Do your paragraphs seem to lead into each other, or
are your ideas scattered throughout the paper?
Looking at the example above, the first thing that comes to mind is that the summary of
Paragraph 6 is significantly longer than the others. A closer look suggests this
paragraph has too many ideas in it: why is “a history of the depression” in the same
paragraph as “incorrect beliefs about the causes and timeframe of
deinstitutionalization”? This paragraph should probably be broken up into two or even
three separate paragraphs.
Next, the organization of the paper seems a bit off. The paper begins with a discussion
of “hobos,” but doesn’t return to it for at least four paragraphs, if not six. This paper
would likely benefit from putting Paragraph 6 after either Paragraph 1 or Paragraph 3.
Furthermore, Paragraphs 3 and 4 seem to be in the wrong place: since histories
usually cause effects, one expects the order of these paragraphs to be reversed. Also,
Paragraph 8 doesn’t seem to belong where it is now, but rather up with Paragraphs 2
and 3.
Last but not least, consider whether these paragraphs support the main claim. Is there
some dissonance between what is being claimed and what is being proven? In this
example, the focus seems to be more on deinstitutionalization than on either hobos or
the homeless; the writer might want to change either the emphases of the paragraphs
or the main claim. In addition, Paragraph 7 has no place in the paper if the claim
remains as it stands, unless the writer can relate the Reagan administration’s policies
to this “transformation.”
By reviewing your reverse outline, you should be able to identify major problem points
with your claim, your evidence, or your organization, and you’ll have a place to begin
your revision process.
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