Personal/art blog that was originally rp/ask. Primary blog to the screencap resource blog anis-screenies and the rp/ask blog stories-of-the-multiverse. I will mostly reblog reference and the like. Sometimes I will post fanworks, concept art, shitposts, or updates on any project I'm working on at the time. I'll post occasional doodles or finished products. Original project I'm working on is lacking a name atm, but is a fantasy sci-fi story.
So decided to make a post listing my sideblogs, other sites I’m on, and commission info, because some of yall might not realize I got an RP sideblog, but also I am starting to take my art related career further again.
So anyways, this is a personal blog, though at the moment I’m mostly reblogging references for writing and illustrating, I am also an art blog, and I feel I can finally do more art again.
So, here’s my side bloges-
RP: @omniversal-stories-library
Screenshot (very inactive atm): @anis-screenies
Concept (where I post story and character concepts): @tales-of-ever-wonders
Here’s the Commissions post
Commissions:Â Being redone
And the other Sites I’m on
dA (haven't posted in a while):Â https://www.deviantart.com/animeschibia
how do you color in such a cool way, with such different colors that just work? is there any tips on that, if not, how did you learn to use such different colors?
every so often i summon my one brain cell and channel the knowledge ive learned from the Old Gods
ok jk jk
do you mean like here?
if so then theres IS a sort of a tip to that! (its a common tip for painterly style)
you can squeeze in a lot of hues in the same plane/object if you balance them with the value unification
in grayscale you can barely see the difference between some hues in the same area because they have almost the exact same value
( same hues can look uh….. very dirty i think )
if the form you’re painting looks ok in grayscale then you can get away with a lot and Marco Bucci proves it very well in his video: https://youtu.be/cPeqyGig0vQ
Marco Bucci has very good videos on color that explain everything much better than I would!
a “tutorial” i did… at the end of last year i think? anyway, originally, i was considering just leaving it on patreon only, but i think it would be more easily accessible for patrons and other people if i uploaded it here. i might make another collection of quick tips sometime.
I have to draw a lot of gold and metal for my work, but wasn't happy with any of the metal tutorials i could find around. I prefer really specific instruction, so after some research i put together what i think works as a generalist's guide/tutorial. Not perfectly accurate, but i hope it's helpful!
excerpt from the original post: this is dictamnus albus—commonly called gas plant. on hot days, it emits a citrusy, flammable oil that briefly ignites when exposed to flame. it’s completely harmless to the plant, but incredible to witness.
It's not perfect- Strawpage's design tools are... not great- but I did my best to bring you all a Tumblr-free transcription of all my lessons. This is probably the most labor-intensive thing I've done for this page (next to the character polls). Four months of blood, sweat, and tears... and now, she LIVES!!!!
Some Notes:
I created it with the intent of Desktop use, so Mobile might have some issues. If it's not working on your phone, try desktop.
Out of the multiple browsers tested (Firefox, Google, Edge, Brave, Safari), Firefox had some issues sporadically.
I'm still going to post lessons on here, first. This page is priority to me, and the website is more of an archive.
The fonts are normal past this opening page.
I will be adding a portion to send funds soon, if'n you are feeling kind and generous.
Thank you all for your patience while I worked on this. It was a labor of love and I hope that it shows. 🙏🏾 Happy scrolling!
Here's some of the notes, starting with the things multiple people brought up:
SHRIMP COCKTAIL:
banahbanah: #flashback to that one fic where Peter Parker frets about drinking shrimp cocktail because of the alcohol
generaldeliciousness: adding: what a prawn/shrimp cocktail is
#why is your character turning it down because they're under 21 #do you think prawn cocktail is a cocktail #this lives in my brain rent-free constantly #the rest of the fic was so normal #and good enough that i'll still re-read it #but bro
And then many, MANY, people wondering if this was actually authour mistake, since Peter really would do this!
POMEGRANATES:
zhajhassa: #haha where's that post that was like someone describing someone eating a pomegranate but they ate it like an apple
thornhands: #once someone wrote persephone biting into a whole Pomegranate #had to stop and stare at a wall for a minute
sungsingsanguine: I once saw someone very confidently write about a character eating slices of pomegranate.
FRUIT TREES:
zagreuses-toast: #given a very endearing glimpse into a writers blindspots by seeing them describe someone sitting under a ''pineapple tree''
salatrash: I remember something about picking watermelons... OF A FUCKING TREE
baander: #cranberry trees
DOUGH/BATTER:
maycelium: #I'm a chef so I'm really used to people not accurately describing how to cook food #But I was surprisingly flabbergasted when someone was writing making a cake and was kneading it. Which uh #Not necessary for cake. It was interesting for sure but just bizarre
livebloggingmydescentintomadness: #the one that drove me nuts was when a character set aside a batch of PASTA DOUGH 'to rise' #pasta doesn't have yeast!! #it does need to REST but it will never RISE #you do not want an airy crumb on your noodles
lovesodeepandwideandwell: #THE ONE WHERE THEY MADE COOKIES BY LADLING BATTER INTO A TRAY
Some other topics:
ANIMALS:
catenarwhal: #mandatory 'how cows produce milk' mention#i'll never recover from that one I fear
piromantic: #one time i saw someone fake their way through describing how spiders behave
pluto-lichen: horses
misskittypotter: #stardew valley faking its way through what fresh fish smell like
pa-pa-plasma: #saw someone faking their way through knowing what a seal is once #i still am fucked up over that one to this day. they just straight up did not know #& they were NOT good at guessing it either like it was clear they had never googled that animal ever #& was only just now realizing via answering questions from anons that seals are not!! what they assumed. initially
SEX:
dykevandyke: #what a prostate is #and where it is located #as in. external.
dreamyeyedrose: #I remember back in the ff.net days reading an Ichigo/Renji fic where the writer assumed the penises go inside each other #and I was like “I mean I don't know how it works for sure I don't have one but idk if that's how it works”
SOME OTHER FOOD STUFF:
thetrekkiehasthephonebox: #add another one to the list bloggers#this character is cooking a salad
shosta: #still baffled about the published work that didn't know food could freeze
sun-dari: #once i read a fic where the author didn't understand cinnamon
alto-tenure: #read something recently where the author was just. blatantly wrong about spices
dramatic-dolphin: #i saw someone try to fake their way through what ramen is once. like 14 years ago.#but i remember.#i was very confused about ramen for a few months. they were writing it so authoritatively.
the-celery-stalks-at-midnight: #i will never ever forget someone putting leftover fries in the microwave to reheat them and setting the timer for five minutes
typeghost: #this sparked a memory of a hannibal fic where the author had to fake their way through writing about gravy
draculin: #the one fanfic where the author knows about coffee only as a concept wrote a character as a coffee drinker#was very interesting#I don't remember the fandom or the plot but I was mesmerized by the coffee actions and choices
11235811235811: #there's a lot of faking their way thru congee in the svsss fandom i'll also note
fishali3n: #read one where the person clearly didnt know what tofu is
emmy-everafter: #in the aftermath of shadow and bone s2 i saw a lot of people pretending to know what stroopwafels are #babes they are more like cookies than breakfast waffles #like yes there is a waffle pattern but you're not gonna cut into a stack of them with syrup and sugar#🤣🤣🤣
NON-FOOD STUFF:
red-umbrella-811: Shoutout to Dame Agatha Christie for faking her way through what a wrench is in a very popular published work.
bluebeetle: #once saw someone have a character put an entire phone book in their pocket
nonametis: #- sex talk in languages other than english #<- or just the petnames in a different language other than English
sadisticpony: #the fanfiction i saw this week where op DIDNT KNOW HOW AUTOMATIC DOORS WORKED #and that they arent in peoples homes!!! of course. also opening the automatic door for someone is unironically very funny but its not #its not like. grabbing the door handle to let someone in. helpppp
danmeichael: #reminds me of the fic with the figure drawing class where the character started with the feet. #i love you feet first figure drawing author
meowmix1100blr: #me watching this one fic absolutely obliterate what the board of directors does
vexedhexes: #one time i read an architect character making a doorway bigger by building a bigger door #what a beautiful world. #OH. also gravity falls fic where they go 'oh piedmont is in california so its warm all year round'
leveragehunters: #characters going to a beer garden #And it's literally a garden outside the pub#It was a very cute mistake
fitofpique: #yes! #grown men do not get blind drunk off two beers #but i am possibly guilty of the hypothermia one #assuming it does not make you very horny?
dadvans-likes: #always thinking abt the soup kitchen fic #the entire setting of the fic was 'soup kitchen' #and i very quickly realized #the author did not know what a soup kitchen was #and they thought that soup kitchens only served soup #fic
msmargaretmurry: #i love fanfiction #once read a fic where the characters played 20 questions #but the author seemed to not know how to play 20 questions and was just kind of winging it........ #immaculate
shakespeareaddict: #Look I know not all of us are hockey experts #But it takes about ten seconds of research or any attention paid to the show to realize #That the Stanley cup playoffs are not in fucking September
baejax-the-great: #the funniest one i saw #was someone faking what church is like #like 1. they really didn't have to write an entire church experience for their fic #and 2. they had clearly never even watched a show where people went to church #it was bonkers weird
twosunson: #things ive seen authors faking #knowing how to unclog a drain #knowing. literally any history #knowing what ketamine looks like (apparently- oregano) #(you know who you are)
waterhorseyblues-ao3: #beltane being celebrated in winter #wales being portrayed as a completely separated land from england (i wish) #characters getting up after weeks of bedrest like that dosnt completely fuck you up
violetfairydust: #i once read a fic where the flight time from london to seattle was 3 hours
purekesseltrash: One time, in a fic set specifically in Des Moines, IA, two of the characters casually drove 20 minutes to the ocean. The memory continues to delight me. I want to know where that author thought that Iowa was.
Using a Reverse Outline to Understand Your First Draft’s Structure Before Editing
I've been using versions of this tool for years, for both my own self-editing and when I work as a developmental editor for clients. Now I'd like to share a template and a hopefully not-too-long explanation of ways you can work with it!
First off: congratulations on finishing a draft of your story! Now, as you get ready to revise it into a second, improved draft, it helps to see what the story is currently shaped like. Even if you aren’t a “planner” who outlines stories before writing them, you can benefit from a reverse outline after completing the story. It's lower-pressure and often easier than a planning outline because you just need to describe what you’ve already written. In fact, writing about your story can be pretty fun! And it will give you a sense of direction and increased confidence as you begin editing.
A reverse outline can be as simple or as detailed as you like. I’m going to give directions (and a sample file) for a fairly detailed one, which you can use as-is if it works for you, or adapt to be simpler, or adapt to include additional elements if that’s better for your process.
Here's the link to the reverse outline template in Drive. I've filled out the first few rows with example information from one of my own stories. Please go ahead and make a copy for your own use! One tip: under the "View" tab, there's an option to "Freeze" columns or rows so they move with you as you scroll in the file. I've already frozen the top row; you may also want to freeze columns A and B for ease of reference when you scroll horizontally. There are quite a few columns, and you don’t need to use all of them at once—different elements are more relevant to different writers and in different stories. In the rest of this post, I’ll explain what each column can do for you.
(The second tab of the file includes a sample reverse outline for nonfiction, with examples from a book of advice on editing that I'm writing at the moment and which this post may become a chapter in. Exactly what columns you’ll want in a nonfiction reverse outline will depend on your overall structure. Narrative nonfiction and memoir use similar techniques as fiction and could benefit from the standard reverse outline.)
Column A: Chapter number and title, scene
Some writers make their reverse outlines chapter-by-chapter, but since each chapter can include multiple scenes, and each scene deserves TLC, let’s give each scene a row.
(My reverse outline sample is for one of my short story collections, so I've given the title of the short story instead of a chapter number. Again, the template is adaptable!)
Among other benefits, filling out this column shows if you've acquired two Chapter 20s by accident. Or if you've given some chapters too-similar titles. Or if one chapter has way more scenes, or way fewer, than any other—which isn’t necessarily a problem, just something to observe right now.
While I’m giving advice: using the “Heading” style to mark your chapter titles/numbers makes it easier to find things your manuscript. Headings get their own space in the Navigation toolbar that comes up when you hit “Control + F” in Microsoft Word or click the “Document Tabs” option in Google Drive.
Column B: Action summary
Write about what happens in the scene. How much detail to include depends on your personal taste and memory. You don’t want to crowd the box with information or take a very long time at this. But it can be useful to spell out not just what happens, but some of why it happens and what results. This helps you follow the chain of logic and spot where links might be weak or missing.
A quick example of how an action summary can include cause and effect: “Overhearing Jason’s phone call, Miranda begins to suspect he was involved in the murder. She confronts him, he denies everything, and he leaves the house and doesn’t come back that night.” If you feel comfortable with shorter action summaries, you might just write this as “Miranda confronts Jason about the murder. He leaves.”
If you're going to write a synopsis to query this novel to literary agents or publishers, the reverse outline can help you get started. (I made my first reverse outlines for synopsis-writing purposes, before adapting them for other uses as both a writer and a freelance editor.) It accomplishes the major step of turning a novel into a few pages. You’ll still need to edit those few pages into something shorter and smoother, and I'd write the actual synopsis after you've given the book a structural edit, since elements of the plot may change in the process!
Speaking of summary, if the action in the story draft is told in narrative summary rather than shown as it happens, it’s often helpful to make a note of this. Summary has its uses: it can convey a lot to the reader quickly and it adds variety to pacing. Whether you have too much narrative summary or too little is something to consider once you have the outline filled out.
Column C: Scene wordcount
Use words, not number of pages, because the same amount of words can fit on more or fewer pages with different formatting. In publishing and professional editing, there’s still the convention that 1 page = 250 words, but in my experience, 12-point Times New Roman font that’s double spaced often fits 300+ words onto a page.
Column D: Cumulative wordcount
I’ve entered a formula here to sum up column C to the current row. This gives you a sense of when each scene takes place on the scale of the story, and also how your pacing is. (You can click the corner of a cell and drag it down to extend the formula as you add more scenes.)
That's the simplest version.
If you just want to fill in the first three columns and let the formula fill out the fourth for you, that gives you a one-sheet "map" of your story that can make the full manuscript easier to navigate, and it can be sufficient to get started on evaluating your story. But you’re missing half the fun.
Column E: POV character
To avoid both reader and writer confusion, I recommend sticking to one POV per scene. Some editors and publishers insist on it. But if you want to risk omniscient POV, that can go here too.
This column reveals when POV changes and whose perspective we spend the most time in. In one story I’m working on, I've added notes in this column about alternative POVs I could narrate the scene from, if I decide to change things up in the second draft. You don’t need to divide POV equally among all your characters, even if you have multiple protagonists. However, if one POV evaporates from the story partway through, or one takes over a long stretch of chapters, it’s good to spot this. And readers may be distracted if you have one or two scenes that make atypical POV choices without clear reason.
Columns F and G: Location; Date and time
These may help you catch continuity errors, like if a character returns home from the same trip twice, a minor character is in two places at once, or a particular evening in August winds up way too busy.
Column G is especially helpful for stories that span a long time—or a very short time. Even if you don’t have exact dates, a note such as “three days after the previous scene” can help avoid logistical tangles. (When timeline is especially important to a story, some writers fill out a virtual or physical calendar with their story events. You can often get print calendars for the previous year cheaply at an office supply or stationary store in January/February.)
If your story takes place in a single location or timeline is not a big concern, you don’t need to use these columns—this reverse outline is always customizable!
Column H: Plot and subplots advanced
There’s a lot going on in a story, and often a lot going on at the same time. This column lets you track where and when different plotlines are developed. You may find it useful to label your plots and subplots with categories like “External” (dealing with the world around the protagonist), “Internal" (psychological change that drives character arcs), or “Interpersonal” (rivalry, romance, and more).
Column I: Conflict of the scene and character desires
Conflict doesn’t have to be violent or flashy. But stories generally include a goal and some friction that prevents the goal from being met. In this way, desire and conflict are often closely connected.
If nobody wanted things to change, there wouldn’t be much to write a story about. If everyone immediately got the change they desire, the story would be very short. Adding friction will make events feel more realistic and engaging to readers. Conflict creates suspense: if there are opposing forces, we can’t predict who will win (or how they’ll manage to win, even if we trust the story will end well for a character). Conflict also lets you explore multiple sides of a situation or theme.
Depending on how you fill out the action summary in Column B, you might cover much of this information there. But I suggest filling out Column I for at least a few scenes to get the hang of evaluating conflict and motivation. If these are missing, a scene can feel directionless and emotionally flat.
Splitting information across multiple columns can also prevent any one part of the outline from getting too swollen. Especially if you write long or action-packed scenes, you may find yourself writing a lot in each cell. A few solutions: one, you may prioritize only the most significant developments of each scene. You can always come back and add more information later. Two, you may realize a scene would work better as two shorter or simpler scenes. (Though don't do this just because it's busy in the outline: consider how the scene itself reads in the story.) Three, you may adapt the outline to give each scene multiple rows evaluating different elements. Just put the wordcount in column C as 0 for the added rows, and it won’t mess up the cumulative wordcount formula (I've given an example in the template).
If the protagonist does get what they want, you’ve either reached the happy ending of the story (or at least a subplot) or you need to give them something else to want, another itch to satisfy. Maybe solving one problem makes them realize there’s an additional problem. Or it’s a question of short-term vs long-term goals: Frodo has made it to Rivendell, but then he takes on the new goal of reaching Mordor.
Column J: Reader emotional response
One reason we write stories is because we want to make people feel things. Here’s where you can talk about what you want the reader to feel. This gives you ideas for what to punch up and enhance in revisions. If you want them to be sad, what is the line they’ll start crying on?If you want them to be hopeful, what should they hope for and why will they feel hope that it will happen?
You may update this column after getting beta reader feedback on an early draft (but not a first draft—the first draft is for you): where and how did your beta react? Was it the way you hoped for, or were there surprises? You could even ask your beta reader to fill out a version of this chart.
Column K: Questions raised or intensified
A powerful emotion to draw readers in is curiosity. And every story will involve some exposition and explanation as we learn about the characters, the setting, and the plotline. Some writers use the term Dramatic Question or Narrative Question to refer to the single biggest and most crucial question that keeps the story going. Once that single question is answered, the story wraps up. Others use the term Story Questions for the various mysteries on different scales that keep readers turning pages—and not just in mystery novels. Whatever you call them, you can track in this column the questions you expect readers to ask with each scene.
In general, when a question is answered, a new, larger or more intense one should take its place. Or the answer to a still-lingering question becomes more urgent. By the end of the story, the majority of questions are answered. You may include a sequel hook, and writers often leave some small, tantalizing details open-ended to make a story feel more realistic, more vivid, or more haunting—or because we don’t have space to chase down every loose end. But if your biggest questions aren’t resolved, the story doesn’t feel over.
I find story questions hugely exciting because curiosity is what most often sucks me in as a reader. But a story isn’t just an intellectual exercise. It’s fatal if a reader ever decides, “I don’t care about learning the answer to this question.” Make sure your other columns are providing reasons for readers to care (especially column J).
You don't want this column to be empty. But you may not want it to get too full, either. It’s possible to draw out a question for too long, leaving readers confused or frustrated. It’s also possible to raise too many questions to easily keep track of. If they’re asking too much and learning too little, some readers might give up on ever finding answers. So be sure to consider both new questions and the weight of the questions already hanging over the readers' (and characters') heads.
As for where to track the answers, it’s dealer’s choice—you could put them in this column, or the answers might be described as part of the action summary or another column. Use this outline in a way that matches how you think, since it's organizing your story.
This is another column it can be useful to ask your beta readers to fill out (or "What questions do you have at the end of this chapter?" could be something to ask them in another format.) You may be surprised by what piques your readers' curiosity!
To reiterate, the mysteries that draw a reader to the next page or chapter—or sentence—don't have to be big. Jack Hart’s guide to narrative nonfiction, Storycraft, provides two excellent examples of opening lines with tiny mysteries that hook you. Joan Didion begins a piece with “Imagine Banyan Street first, because Banyan Street is where it happened.” Right away we wonder: what is “it”? And where is Banyan Street? The second example was written by Spencer Heinz in the Oregonian: “Pat Yost was in bed when she heard the sound.” Most readers will give Heinz’s next few sentences their attention to learn what the sound was, and Yost’s vulnerability makes the question feel urgent. You can get a bit too obviously manipulative with tiny questions (so that the reader asks “For crying out loud, what is it now?”), but it’s a useful technique to keep in mind.
The other beauty of these questions is that they can make the need for exposition work for you. Rather than being bored to tears by an infodump, the reader is intrigued by hints and glimpses, then satisfied to receive more context and explanation.
Column L: New characters and concepts introduced
This column can help you pace your exposition and introductions. (It overlaps with the previous column, but different writers find different angles helpful for analyzing a story, so I’ve included both. You may not fill out this column for every chapter, especially shorter chapters or chapters later in the story.) Tracking this can prevent you from introducing the same person in two different scenes. It also reveals opportunities to energize any doldrums in the middle of your story by adding a new idea.
Column M: Notes (and whatever else you desire)
I use this column to make revision suggestions to myself. You can also use it to track elements you find important but which don’t fit in other columns. Again, please feel free to add more columns and delete ones that aren’t a priority for this story or your process!
Mystery writers may want a column to keep track of where clues or red herrings appear. Romance novelists may want to track beats. A kinky romance novelist may want to keep track of which toys the characters use in which sex scene. Other writers may want to track what Robert McKee calls the “value charge,” measuring how much closer to or farther from their goal a character has moved.
Using the Outline
You don't have to fill out the entire spreadsheet in one sitting. You might do a few chapters/scenes at a time. You might get one or two columns completely filled out in one go (I do columns A and C together) but take time to do the rest. Some columns may never get entirely filled out. My tip is to try every column to start with, because you never know what will make something click for you. It’s better to fill out half the columns than none.
Some authors create reverse outlines as they write the first draft. After completing each chapter, they end their writing session by filling out a row with a summary of what they’ve just written. This has the benefit of your memory being fresher, and if it sounds like it’d work for you, please try it! It may help you spot issues early and course correct. However, some authors find too much analysis paralyzing in the first draft stage. Personally, I find it easier and fun to do my outline at the end, in a sugar rush of triumphant celebration at finishing a story. I write it up, stand back dusting my hands, and go “Well, what do we have here?”
And what do we have here?
Things a reverse outline can reveal:
Where does your climax—the peak of suspense, intensity, and emotion—happen in the story? How close to the end? How do you build up to it and climb back down? Are there mini-climaxes earlier in the story to keep readers engaged? Your main plot will have a climax, and so will your subplots and your character arcs. These may be located in different places, or they may all climax together. (Stop snickering, you in the back!)
What’s left unresolved at the end of the book? (For traditional publication, you’ll have the best luck if your first book is a “standalone,” though it may have opportunities for a sequel if it sells well. You might think self-publishing is more forgiving, but in fact, readers may greet a cliffhanger ending with bad reviews if they feel you’re trying to trap them into buying more books for unclear payoff. They may even return the book and demand a refund. However, in both traditional and self-publishing, books later in a series may end in cliffhangers once the author has won readers’ trust by finishing earlier stories in a satisfying way.)
How do the character arcs develop? Anything important enough to write a story about will probably change a person—how are each character’s actions and desires different at the end of the story than they were at the beginning?
How long are questions left unanswered or conflicts left unresolved? You generally want these to last for at least a few chapters to let suspense grow and keep the story flowing. (The author Benjamin Percy, in Thrill Me, speaks of his failed early novels: “I treated chapters like short stories, introducing and resolving trouble in fifteen pages. The containment, the stand-aloneness of my chapters, gave my books a stop-start quality that destroyed any sense of momentum.”) At the same time, each scene should make a little progress, whether positive or negative. It will end with the character a little better off or worse off (or better in some ways, worse in others) than they were before.
Friction, tension, conflict, and struggle make a story richer and more vivid. Even for small and simple goals, let the readers and characters yearn just a bit before you give them what they want. Make sure your payoffs each have setup.
Do you have scenes without action? Or where the action is all internal rather than external: does your protagonist sit around thinking until they change their mind about something? This isn’t fatal—I’ve done it myself on occasion. But try not to make these static scenes too frequent (and internal action is better than no action at all: beware scenes that are pure exposition).
Do you have scenes that are overgrown transitions, moving characters from Point A to Point B? In particular, you have an overgrown transition rather than a proper scene when there aren’t enough questions, conflict, stakes, urgency, or emotional engagement. Make your story more vivid by fleshing out these transitions or removing them (a transition can often become a paragraph or sentence at the beginning of the next scene).
Do any significant events happen off-page or between scenes? Would it be clearer or more impactful for readers if they happen on-page?
Do you spend a lot of wordcount introducing a particular character, setting, or detail that doesn’t go on to play a significant role in the story? Be wary of one-offs: characters, POVs, locations, and apparent subplots that only appear once may be a sign you should develop them further—or take them out entirely. Not always! But make sure it’s clear to readers why you break your story’s pattern. Sometimes, an author will give a character one flashback scene to share backstory. However interesting the backstory, be sure the events of that flashback are relevant to their present-day storyline!
How does each scene fit into to the larger story? How do the subplots connect to each other? If something doesn’t connect, does it belong? Can you flesh it out and connect it more? (Whether you connect it more tightly or delete it often depends on if your story is longer or shorter than you want it to be—see next section.)
You can color-code rows by subplot if that makes things easier for you. The reverse outline can become a very visual document, helping you see things it’s harder to find in a manuscript of text.
Look at scenes that only advance a single plot or subplot, and see how strong they are in the other columns. One way to punch up a sagging scene is to combine it with a second scene and do two things at once. Maybe the scene in which Miranda overhears Jason’s suspicious phone call is also the scene where she reels from the revelation that she’s about to be fired from her dream job (which she learned in the previous chapter). As our friend writing at the Cincinnati Enquirer in February 1947 said, “Life is just one damn thing after another, is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.”
Do tensions and stakes rise over the course of the story? This is often phrased as “things have to get worse and worse for your characters,” but that isn’t the only option. Giving your characters an occasional “break” provides hope, which, for you literary sadists, gives characters more to lose when things get worse again. Hope raises the stakes. And building a character up lets you continue a story for longer because it gives them farther to fall. The occasional achievement can give your character new abilities and resources to make future scenes exciting. Also, alternating hope with loss or disappointment creates a variety in tone and texture; most readers find variety welcome. (This also means you should beware of too many scenes of unmitigated success, even if your story's tone is one of cozy wish fulfillment.) In some genres, both your character and your audience may need occasional injections of hope to be motivated to see the story through. There are exceptions—a short horror novel may be nothing but things getting worse—but overall, don’t worry that you’re failing at suspenseful storytelling if your characters are sometimes happy! But there still should be something missing, an unanswered question, an unachieved goal, or an unresolved risk that keeps the story going. And generally, these risks, goals, questions, and unfulfilled desires should get bigger as the story goes on.
How's the length of your story?
Some writers end up with first drafts way longer than they want. Some wind up with first drafts that are too short. For some authors, each story causes them wordcount-related stress in a different way. And in every manuscript, whatever its overall length, some scenes will go on a bit longer than they need to, while several character details and plot threads will tantalize with their ability to be developed further.
Too long/too short is also a question of the audience you’re writing for. Young adult novels tend to be shorter than adult historical epics. If you’re writing fiction to publish in magazines paying pro rates, you'll often have a better short with a 4,000-word short story than a 9,000-word novelette. And if you don’t intend to write a novella (I love them, but they can be tricky to sell), then a 40,000-word “novel” probably needs more development.
If your story or scene is too long, either:
Too much is happening
You’re giving too many details about what’s happening
(It may be both at once, of course.)
You’ll want to make changes in that order: first, decide what needs to happen in the story. As I advised earlier, making some of it happen simultaneously can reduce the number of scenes and make each scene more intense. But upon consideration, and with the help of your reverse outline, you may find one or two excess subplots. Save them for a different story.
Once you’ve reduced your number of scenes, if you’re still longer than you want, look at each scene and tighten paragraphs and lines. But that fine-tuning is something to work on later, in the line-editing rather than organization or structural edit (what I'm calling the second draft in this post, and which we editors also call developmental editing).
If your story is too short, either:
Not enough is happening
You’re not giving enough details about what is happening
Should you add a subplot, or draw out a subplot you currently have? Do the characters’ problems get resolved too quickly? Have you raised enough narrative questions? Given enough answers? Is the conflict strong enough and are the stakes high enough? Have you shown how high the stakes are? Look at where you’ve used narrative summary. Would any of this be more interesting or dramatic as a scene? Are there sentences you could expand to paragraphs, or paragraphs into chapters? Don’t pad the story, but flesh it out.
You may want to do more research, especially if you put research aside to complete your first draft (which you've done—congratulations!) Learning about your characters’ jobs, the world they inhabit, and processes within it can open up lots of avenues, many of which you wouldn’t have predicted.
Or you may write short because you know so much about the story. You’ve been developing this magic system since you were in high school, so you don’t realize how weird and wondrous it is to your readers and how much they’d enjoy a (vivid, active, non-lecture) tour of it. Now’s the time to add some more scenes of your protagonist learning to use magic! Or, switching genres, a mystery writer may have meticulously planned the crime—but they need to add enough description that the reader can follow the logistics.
The emotions of revision
Personally, I think adding more scenes and details is great fun. You get to write fanfiction of your first draft—and publish it! However, expanding a story can take time and requires you to keep track of what you’re doing. The record in the reverse outline will help with that.
Cutting scenes, plot threads, characters, and even favorite sentences can be melancholy. I encourage writers to save what they cut in case it can fit in a future story—even if it doesn’t, this feels less like a final execution. However, sometimes cutting something is a relief. You’ve had a feeling that element wasn’t working out, and now you can let it go.
Some writers may get a little too eager to cut. It might seem like the easy way out, but if you delete everything that causes you trouble, the story will get smaller and smaller, and it might wind up less interesting as a result. You’re also depriving yourself of the chance to stretch your creativity and try new things. (Mary Oliver in A Poetry Handbook warns that “deletion teaches nothing.”) It’s a judgment call: does this troublesome bit have enough potential that it’s worth rescuing through revision? Try sleeping on it in case your subconscious offers a new solution you hadn’t expected. If that doesn’t pan out, you can always save the idea to try again in a different story. As Matthew Salesses says in Craft in the Real World, “Some encouragement (hopefully)! The bulk of successful writing is in the fact that you have an endless number of tries. Persistence is key.”
To wrap up, a few more uses of reverse outlining:
Reread your story in light of the outline. Going between the outline and each scene, consider this question: does your outline describe what’s actually on the page or what you intended to write? If your outline is more wishful than actual, that's still progress: it's helped you express your intentions, which is a step that brings them closer to reality. Now the reverse outline has become a planning outline for your next draft.
Similarly, some authors find it tricky to revise existing scenes. Instead, they write the second draft more or less from scratch in a new file. They trust their memory to give them back the best parts of the stroy and to drop or rework what wasn’t succeeding. If you want to use this approach but still need some guidance, the reverse outline can be made into a new outline.
You can reverse outline other people’s books! It's fun and insightful to examine how a favorite author works on a scene-by-scene level. Heck, it can also give insight into how an author you can’t stand, but who is undeservedly successful, works on a scene-by-scene level. Maybe you can learn from their success after all.
Again, here’s the reverse outline template in Google Sheets, with an example from one of my own stories filling out the first few rows. Make a copy and make it yours!
I'm fascinated by how the animators for TADC handle Caine's impossible anatomy so well. There's so much to balance and they've somehow engineered a solution for his expressions to hold during speech.
I also traced Caine answering the phone from episode 4 to demonstrate his phonemes and mouth shapes.
This reminds me of the fact that "Ancient Egypt" goes back so many thousands of years, that the most recent "Ancient Egyptians" were already studying (even more) Ancient Egypt.
For context, the last Pharaoh, Cleopatra VII, lived in the 1st century BCE. Prince Khaemweset, known as "the first egyptologist", was as ancient to her as the pyramids and tombs he was studying were ancient to him.
This has totally be mentioned in another fork of this post, but it reminds me quite a bit of Ennigaldi-Nanna's museum, a museum in Ur, c. 530 BC, which housed mesopotamian artifacts dating back in some cases to the 20th century BC
Expanding a thought from a conversation this morning:
In general, I think "Is X out-of-character?" is not a terribly useful question for a writer. It shuts down possibility, and interesting directions you could take a character.
A better question, I believe, is "What would it take for Character to do X?" What extremity would she find herself in, where X starts to look like a good idea? What loyalties or fears leave him with X as his only option? THAT'S where a potentially interesting story lies.
In practice, I find that you can often justify much more from a character than you initially dreamed you could: some of my best stories come from "What might drive Character to do [thing he would never do]?" As long as you make it clear to the reader what the hell pushed your character to this point, you've got the seed of a compelling story on your hands.
