Here’s the Best Editing Trick in the Book

You’ve finished your first draft, put it aside for a week or two, and now it’s time to edit. You open the document, and there it is: tens of thousands of words, hundreds of pages – and you can’t see the wood for the trees.

You start working through the novel, editing as you go, tweaking scenes and honing your prose – but you have absolutely no idea whether your novel works on a structural level, because you are tackling every scene one by one.

To edit your manuscript properly, you need to start with the big-picture issues – and to do that you need to be able to see your novel’s whole storyline at once.

So here is how to get a clear overview of your novel, so that you can see character arcs and plotlines right the way through – and work out where the structure isn’t working:

Reverse outlining.

If traditional outlining is planning the framework of a story before writing it, reverse outlining is the opposite: you write an outline based on the story after you’ve written it.

Chapter by chapter, scene by scene, you go through and note down in a line or two what happens. For example, a reverse outline of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone might start like this:

Chapter 1

The Dursleys are introduced. Dumbledore, helped by McGonagall and Hagrid, leaves baby Harry on the Dursleys’ doorstep – we learn his parents are dead.

Chapter 2 – ten years later

Harry lives in a cupboard under the stairs, and is neglected by his aunt and uncle. During Dudley’s birthday trip to the zoo, Harry talks to a boa constrictor, the glass of its cage magically disappears, and it escapes. Harry is punished.

Chapter 3

Letters begin arriving for Harry but Uncle Vernon intercepts them all, though Harry is moved out of the cupboard. The letters increase in number, until Uncle Vernon takes the family to an isolated island to escape. At midnight, as Harry’s birthday dawns, there is a knock on the door.

Chapter 4

Hagrid enters with a birthday cake. He reveals that Harry is a wizard, and gives him a letter inviting him to Hogwarts. The truth about Harry’s parents’ deaths is revealed.

And you continue as such all the way through your novel. Note that the outline is just for you, the author; you don’t have to explain who characters are (unless they are such minor ones you forget!), or exactly what ‘the truth about Harry’s parents’ deaths’ is. You might, though, find it useful to track which characters are mentioned in each chapter, so that you can, when editing, check if this is a character’s first appearance and ensure they are adequately introduced if so.

At the end, you’ll have a few thousand words covering the entire story and be able to see, much more easily than by reading the whole manuscript, how the overarching plot is working.

The most important thing to track is how each scene progresses the story. That might be the protagonist meeting a character they need to meet, finding a clue or discovering something, having a conversation that moves things forward – anything that would impact the story if you removed it.

If you can’t pin down what happens in the scene to move the plot or story on, that is usually a good sign that that scene isn’t pulling its weight yet, and either needs editing or removing.

But you can track other things too, depending on your novel.

If your novel has multiple timelines or POVs, you can track which timeline or narrative voice each scene utilises – and see how the balance of those works across the whole story.

You can track where clues are revealed, how subplots evolve, or how a key relationship between characters develops.

You can track where things are first mentioned – quidditch, say – so that you don’t introduce something already introduced as if it is novel.

When you can see your whole novel laid out over just a few pages, rather than a few hundred pages, you can see the whole thing from a bird’s eye view – and work out what isn’t working structurally.

If you see, for example, that a key character disappears from the plot for twelve chapters, you might decide you need to rejig the chapter order or add extra scenes so they don’t vanish for so long.

If you see that your love interest isn’t introduced until halfway through – likely too late in a romance – you might decide to bring them in earlier.

If you find that all the major plot points happen in one small section of the manuscript, and that there’s little plot progression in other parts, you might decide to move some key events around to balance thing better – or condense down the chapters where things aren’t progressing.

If you notice that your character does the same thing more than once, or finds a particular clue in chapter 5 but doesn’t then act on it until chapter 12, you can see where you need to change things so that their actions make sense.

All of this is vital information you can use to inform your edits.

A reverse outline has other uses too. It can be a key reminder of where important things happen which you can refer back to as you are revising the manuscript.

In a detective novel you might, for example, note down all the chapters where you have seeded in clues to the killer’s identity – so that as you are editing the novel, you can quickly check what the detective is supposed to know when.

If you decide you have big edits to make to the manuscript – you want to make two characters meet earlier, for example – you can see where you might have that happen, and check quickly to see how their meeting earlier might impact the following chapters, so you know if you will need to make changes there too.

An issue that often comes up when editing is that one seemingly small change can ripple out across the manuscript, and having a reverse outline in front of you can help you work out where those ripples will or should happen. Then you can make the changes you need without getting lost in the full manuscript, trying to work out exactly where it was that your detective first found out that the killer was wearing a red jumper on the night they murdered your victim1.

If you’re currently looking for an agent and would like to submit to me at The Ampersand Agency, you can find the agency submissions guidelines here, and my manuscript wishlist on my website.

If you’re looking for an editor you can contact me via my website, or book a query-package review or coaching call immediately.

Thank you so much for reading, commenting, liking and sharing. As always, please do let me know in the comments if there’s anything in particular you’d like me to write about – or head to the chat to talk about your current projects, ask questions, and get advice!

Happy writing!

Abi