Pigeons made soothing company during paperwork. They perched on the sill of the tall window that was the best feature of my office, come to roost for the night. Wingbeats sounded through the loose panes in the window and I paused in my patient log-writing to listen to their throaty calls, lulled by their sounds until my mailbox lid clacked shut.
The cart! I jumped up to intercept the clerk, but my chair back hit the wall at the wrong angle. By the time I freed myself they were gone around the corner, leaving only the odor of bad news behind.
An evening memo lay coiled in my mailbox. The once beloved sweet, gassy smell of barrel-printing from my days at medical school was now the odor of tightened belts and making do. What did they cut this time? Hospital laundry? No lunch for doctors, since the cold lunch they started serving wasn't a big enough economy?
I grabbed the page and hissed as the edge sliced my little finger.
It was worse than stale paste sandwiches--an order to discharge 30% of my Mental Recovery patients by next week, to prepare for the legions of soldiers returning home from the war. I'd have to choose as if anyone in a bed now was staying in a hospital for the cuisine and ambiance. Who was too mad to leave? Who was sane enough to go? I left it on the desk and put on my coat to meet Robin, jogging downstairs and out the front door.
An autumn breeze kissed my cheeks, a friend I hadn't met in years. The evening air had a streak of winter in it, a promise of frost on the grass in the morning and nothing at all of Laneer's everlasting summer and gunfire. Home. For a moment I believed it. I'm home.
The heavy door of the hospital swung shut behind me. I curled my hand around a cigarette to hide the tell-tale light of the burning end. I shifted to put a graystone pillar between me and the tree with the best line of sight to the front door. It was foolish, but the band of tension along my shoulders eased.
Sixteen men. I had to choose them and send them home.
The hospital doors swung open, releasing a competence of nurses from the daytime shift. Robin slid out of the crowd, a hand-knitted cardigan flung over the shoulders of her gray dress and starched apron, clutching a hand-rolled cigarette. I touched the brim of my bowler and let her have the safe spot next to the ashtray.
"So you're late too," I said.
"Miles." The gap between her upper front teeth flashed in a smile that didn't melt the tension around her eyes. Maybe I had to come back in. Maybe one of my patients started tearing at his skin, or found something sharp to use on his wrists. Or started screaming and couldn't stop.
But she wouldn't be out for a smoke if it was an emergency. whatever had Robin troubled wasn't with the patients. I reached for my inside pocket. "Do you need a light?"
She held up a match. "I've got it. I'm just glad I caught you."
Not a patient emergency. Politics? Dr. Crosby on a rampage again? "What is it, what's wrong?"
"Nothing!" She tapped her cigarette on the back of her hand and slouched.
"No, that's not true. I wanted to tell you, before it gets out..."
She struck the match and let it burn while she cleared her throat.
I fought the urge to blow it out. "What is it?"
"I gave my notice. I'm going to medical school."
Oh. A good man would be happy for Robin. "Excellent. Congratulations."
She gave my arm a reassuring squeeze. "We'll stay in touch."
"We shall." She wouldn't be returning to Beauregard Veteran's when she became Dr. Robin Thorpe. She'd have a year's waiting list as a doctor with an office practice. Double that if she picked a speciality people respected.
She shook my arm a little, dragging my attention away from pitying myself. "I mean it, Miles. You'll still come to holiday dinner, won't you?"
"Will you have time to do up a fuss for holidays?"
"There's always time for family, Miles."
For her, that was true. Robin's family was a wonderful bunch, full of caring and affection. "I'll be glad to come for holidays."
"See? We'll stay in touch. Though you need to make a new friend at work."
"Robin. You're scolding me."
"It isn't good to have work as your only companion--do you hear that?" Thin beaded braids bounced as she cocked her head.
The night air carried a peal of brass bells tuned to clash with each other, their dissonance joined by a chorus of bicycle bells and shouts. Cry-bells. We threw down our smoldering cigarettes and ran to the street.
A carriage careered around the corner. Cyclists scattered like startled fish. The driver hauled on brake and reins, putting his weight into halting the carriage at the curb. We weren't an emergency hospital. Could we help whoever had been rushed here? What if they needed a surgeon?
Cold pooled in my gut. I'd have to do it. There wasn't anyone else.
The coach door banged open and a gentleman leapt out, bearing a sick man in his arms. The patient's face lolled toward me, the shadows around his eyes deep violet. My heart kicked against my chest. Not just sick, by his pallor and the waxy look of his skin. This man was dying. He lifted his trembling hand and clawed at my coat lapels.
I got my arms under his shoulders and knees. "I'm Doctor Singer, Sir. We'll take it from here."
"I found him in the street." The gentleman grasped my arms and between us we made a carry chair. "I'm Tristan Hunter."
I gawped at him for a moment but then we were moving like we had to outrun a tin grenade. "Did he tell you his name?"
"I didn't ask."
The sick man groped for me again.
"Sir? Can you tell me your name?"
"Nick Elliott," the sick man said. "Help me, Starred One. I am murdered."
Beauregard Veteran's was a building in half-mourning, fashioned from gray stones and black framed windows, the kind with many panes pieced together to make a larger whole. It was the old site of Wakefield Cross before they moved into a larger, grander building further uptown and kindly donated the land to a then-sleepy and ceremonial army. It was never built to shelter so many battered souls, but the calm gravity of its proportions shouldered the burden with grace.
A few hours of sleep would go unnoticed. It would sink into the routine of the morning. I took his wrist. His heartbeat fluttered under my fingers, exhausted but still running for its life. Crescent shaped welts reddened the palm of his hand. My vision slid out of ordinary focus and locked on the glowing paths of life inside Old Gerald's body: the rush of air as he breathed, the pulse of blood as his heart beat, and something that almost made me shut my eyes and drop Old Gerald's wrist.
Red-brown muck concentrated itself in Old Gerald's head.
Tristan's two-floor flat was a house of mirrors. Instead of art and photographs mirrors hung on the walls, framed in gilt and rosewood and pale, hand-rubbed birch. The mirror next to Tristan's umbrella stand and the staircase stood inches above my own six feet, the frame carved in a garland of ribbon and woodland creatures peeking from behind lobed oak leaves. Identical silver-framed mirrors flanked a narrow corridor that led to the kitchen, where Tristan prepared a meal with his own hands.
He had an electric piano in his room. It sounded like a piano, and played perfectly in tune. The keys and pedals felt oddly right when he pressed them. But he wanted to sit at a real piano, to feel the sound fill the room instead of the headphones he wore to block out the noise of the other students living in Singer Hall.
Maybe he could book a practice room in the music department if someone would help him work the computer--No. He would talk to this Outsider, come to an agreement.
What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world. We get in the habit of thinking, this is the world, but that’s not true at all. The real world is a much darker and deeper place than this, and much of it is occupied by jellyfish and things.
The Mozart player had stolen Matthew's practice room again. He recognized the sonata from yesterday - Number 8, from the worst summer of Mozart's life - and caught the dissonant chord that marked the last repeat and the end of the movement.
He checked the sign up sheet,but her tempo, the attack on the keys, the cold precision of her playing told him it was the same player from yesterday.
While there is an outlining method where you start at the end of a story and work your way backwards, that’s not what I mean by reverse outlining. If an outline is a plan of a story in short form written before the story is written, a reverse outline is the story’s outline gleaned from the existing text.
When Do you Use It?
I use it in two situations: the first is when I am finished my draft and I’m about to go into revisions. the second is when I am really, really stuck in the middle of a draft and I can’t just throw the story away. I usually do a quick version of the reverse outline if I’m stuck, and I always do a thorough version when i’m done the draft.
How Do you Do It?
First, I need two windows. One is my manuscript, in either word or scrivener. The other is a Blank word document with a 2 column wide table. The left column is to jot down in point form what happens in a single scene. The Right column is a series of questions I answer for every scene:
Whose POV? (If it’s a single POV book I don’t bother of course)
What does POVC want in this scene?
What happens if they don’t get it?
What goes wrong?
How do the POVC’s choices get narrowed?
If none of those questions apply, how is this scene important?
Yeah, every scene. Yeah, I find scenes that are 85% dead weight and 15% decent material. I mark those scenes out in the original by changing the typeface colour, usually to brown, for “this is shit” and I highlight the important stuff inside the scene by turning that text orange, if i’m afraid I’ll forget the part that was good/to save time when it’s time to revise.
Then I ignore those dead weight scenes if I’m reverse outlining to finish the damn draft. I can tackle the shit scenes in revision, and revising is not what I’m doing yet.
Second, I need a Structure Guide. Some scenes in the book line up to points in 3 act structure. There’s a ton of these guides, no particular one is correct, and no particular one is correct in all cases. You can try out a ton of different books about story structure. I like K.M. Weiland’s Structuring Your Novel for a really formal look at story structure. She’s also got a workbook you can use, if you dig workbooks.
Anyway. Go through your document and highlight the important, story turning scenes in your novel. The big moments where everything changes. the scenes with the most significant disasters and triumphs. Highlight them with a background colour. These are your Structure Milestones. Read a version of your story outline that is composed only of your Structure Milestones. How well does it hang together? If you’re preparing for revisions, make some notes on what’s working and what’s not working, what you need to add or remove. If you’re stuck, then you’re looking at what you have so far. Figure out what you’ve got, and it should point to what you’ve got left.
Third, if I’m doing this because I’m stuck, I finish the path. What I need to end the story is already there in the beginning. I have a structure Milestone that is about my Protagonist(s) deciding to achieve a goal - that’s the external plot arc, and it’s the question about the story that I don’t answer until the end. so. Does my protagonist get what they want, or do they fail to get what they want, or do they sacrifice what they want externally in order to achieve something else?
The answer is a Structure Milestone. So I fill it in, and jump back to ask, what forced the protagonist to choose? This is usually the action of the antagonist, but it can also be the action of the Protagonist’s Ally/Mentor. It’s probably a dark and bleak moment.
So now I am outlining backwards, in large hops, to the point where I’m stuck. I then put those milestones in the reverse outline document, and then I outline in more detail from the place that I’m stuck to the next major structure milestone. I only detail to the next, but if I get a good idea past that point I jot it down where I figure it’s going to go.
Then I put my ass in the chair and I write. I’ve probably spent a day or two in this process, and once I’m done enough to know where i’m headed, I stop.
Third, if I’m doing this because it’s time to revise, I examine my pacing. I used to think pacing was “exciting things happening.” I have revised this to “a narrowing of choices.” So at the beginning of the story, nothing’s narrow. The point where an Ordinary Day Becomes Something Else? The protagonist might be able to walk away from that, exercising other options.
So you take that option away. And the next one, and the next. Keep hitting the protagonist with tough choices, choices where choosing (or trying not to choose) comes with a price. and keep doing it, until there’s only one choice left.
I also count scenes between milestones. What’s my average? in a short story, there’s likely to be zero scenes between milestones. In a long one, I’m getting complicated with multiple plot lines, so there could be a bunch of scenes between them, maybe with their own mini-milestones. But what I’m looking for in every plot and sub-plot is a narrowing of choices, headed toward the final choice at the story’s climax.
Then I have successfully reverse outlined, and I can continue with my revisions.
Back in school, I reluctantly wrote outlines. You know the ones: Roman numerals, capital letters, numbers, lowercase letters, and so on. They all sucked the life and creativity out of my writing, so the instant I escaped school, I vowed no more outlines.
For the last twenty-five years, that’s how I’ve written – happily outline-free. Lack of outlines got me a wonderful following in fandom and a deal for two original novels.
Now, thanks to the incredibly prolific gallagherwitt and Libbie Hawker, I realize I’ve been doing it wrong this whole time.
