Outlining in Reverse

By AARON HAMBURGER date published JANUARY 21, 2013 9:15 PM date updated
January 21, 2013 9:15 pm New York Times

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.

Aaron Hamburger is the author of the story collection “The View From Stalin’s Head”
and the novel “Faith for Beginners.” He teaches writing at the Stonecoast M.F.A.
program.