Writing in Reverse

I was stuck. I had laid out the plot. I had worked out my beats, my arc, my subplots. I had developed and redeveloped my ever evolving characters. I had employed methods from mystery writing to strategically drop clues into scenes. All the components were there. Each chapter had a reason for being. I was 50,000 words into writing the novel, my target goal.

Yet, the details were all over the place. Sections needed to be fleshed out. There was no real flow. The order of chapters was interchangeable in many places. I know because I kept flipping them to see which served the story line best. It’s dual POV, and the characters’ perspectives influence how events in the story unfold.

Basically, the ligaments on my skeleton weren’t holding the bones together properly. Some muscles were strong, others weak. I couldn’t lay the skin over until I had all those details worked out.

Then I remembered a blog post I came across recently. Tragically, I can’t find the post; the SEO is failing me. It was about writing fight scenes backwards. I investigated, and it turns out that plotting a book backward is a recommended strategy for plotting and editing.

I tweeted about this and got some interesting responses, but the responses didn’t quite get at the notion of writing chapter 30 before writing chapter 29 as a strategy. One reader talked about reverse chronology in story telling. Another pointed out that I should know my conclusion before I start writing.

This wasn’t what I was after.

Digging around I found some useful blogs about writing backwards. Janice Hardy, Fiction University blogger, talks about plotting backwards after the plotting stage. Her method most closely reflects the stage where I was stuck. She also describes going forward and backward, which is what I think I’m doing, working my way toward the midpoint from the outer limits.

Angelica Hartgers, author of The Emotion Thesaurus, talks about reverse engineering the plot. She’s describing the initial stages of developing the plot. Brandie June talks about the reverse outline as it applies to the revision stage. All different applications, but same idea.

To get unstuck, I needed to write my story backward. So I started doing that. I went straight for my epic final battle scene, finishing it with a witty comment about gut health from the victorious heroin. I worked through to the villain’s gruesome end and then all the way to the beginning when the villain comes on the scene to wreak havoc.

All the while, I was able to link back to the chapters where certain clues or references needed to be dropped. New clues emerged as a result of a scent on the air or a sensation that was experienced in the fight or a scene leading up to it.

Allowing my heroine to kick ass, allowed me to see exactly how she needed to have her own ass kicked early on.

This experience was magical. It transformed a tangled mass of threads into an elaborated web that glistens.

I’m still looking for that blog post about writing reverse scenes in reverse. Contact me if you see come across it or something similar.