Plotting in reverse

This is Part II of me trying to answer LM’s query, specifically the part about backward planning—that is, starting with a climax scene and working out the plot backwards from that. I had a whole other post written, then realized that I had gotten distracted talking about types of climaxes and not really talked about reverse plotting. So I’ll save that one for next week.

It is theoretically possible to work backwards (or forwards) from any point in a story. In practice, the writer usually has envisioned a lovely dramatic scene or set-piece that is the outcome of whatever the plot is, so working backward usually involves asking, over and over, “How do I get this to happen?” Or, more bluntly, “How, exactly, did this person/these people get into this mess?”

I will pause here briefly to point out that every scene both grows out of whatever came earlier, and points to what comes later. This includes opening scenes, climax scenes, and the last scene in the story. Therefore, almost any scene (or prompt) that is meant to start a story can be used as a prompt for ending a story, if one presents it right. The opening scene in which the main character prepares to start a new job can proceed into a story about how that character handles the challenges of their new position, or it can be the ending of a story about how that character earned the job, promotion, or whatever.

(This is one of the things that makes life difficult for heavily character-and-history-centered writers—figuring out the boundaries of a story, where it starts and ends, is not obvious, because no matter what point they pick, there is story-stuff that happened before it and more story stuff that happens after it. Sometimes, all the writer can do is grit their teeth and decide to start/stop there, and save everything else for prequels or sequels.)

Back to reverse plotting. The climax of a story is usually the point at which the central problem is permanently dealt with in some way (successful, unsuccessful, or permanently abandoned).  If the writer has hold of a scene that is a climax, it should be fairly obvious what the central problem of the story will be. Unfortunately, one of the things that makes a climax dramatic and effective is having multiple problems reaching a climax at once, which can be confusing if they are close to evenly balanced in importance. In that case, the writer has to decide what kind of story they want to write.

In other words, to work backward from a multiple-climax scene, the writer gets to pick which climax is the most important, at least to some extent. Say that a writer has been handed a combined action-decision-realization climax scene (that is, one in which an action/crisis climax, a decision climax, and a realization climax all combine to make the scene as dramatic as possible). That writer can decide to make the decision the center of the story, rather than the action or the realization. They’ll still have to deal with all three story problems, or the climactic scene won’t have the impact that it should, but leading up to the character facing that difficult decision is the focus that informs how the writer builds the rest of the story. It’s the main story problem, because that’s how this writer wants to write this story.

Having determined what the main problem is, the writer then has the further choice of how to proceed with answering the “How did the main character(s) get into this mess/problem?” One method is to work backward methodically, starting with the events that immediately precede the climax. What was the very last thing that happened that brought the characters to this final point for the central story problem? Maybe it was ten minutes of battle or chasing the villain. Maybe it was the main character staring into a fire, wondering if they were wrong about that one thing, or dreading the decision they’ve been avoiding since Page One. Maybe it was the sidekick making an offhand comment that puts the last crack in the main character’s mental/emotional defenses, so that they’re ready to crumble in the final scene. Then the writer does the same thing for each of the secondary issues (if there’s more than one climax). Then back up a step and work out the next-to-very-last step for each thing, lather, rinse, and repeat.

Alternatively, one can focus on tracking back just the main story problem, one step at a time, and then go back and look at what the progress of the other elements was and how each of them can contribute to and/or support the character’s progress through the main storyline. Check the places where some action progress can interrupt the character pondering that decision they don’t want to make, or the spot where they are so deep in denial that they screw up the action thing they should do next. Look for spots where the character makes the wrong choices (long-term) because they have begun to suspect that they’re wrong about the main story problem. The development of the main storyline acts like the deck of a suspension bridge, and the other subplot storylines act like the cables that hold the main line in place.

Or, rather than being methodical, one can look at whatever other story-stuff one has and try to arrange it in some order that feels right. Working like this, expect there to be gaps in the story where the summary says “stuff happens.” Then work on a fractal-snowflake-design, like the Koch snowflake, where you elaborate just a little on each of your main points, and then you elaborate again on each of those points, getting more and more detailed (and filling in more and more of the blank spaces) until you have a whole outline. The beauty of this is that you can skip around, elaborating on the bit right before the climax over and over and then suddenly skipping back to the opening or the middle that are still at the “stuff happens” stage.

Two other things to remember are 1) You need enough of an outline to be going on with…and for the vast majority of writers, that does not mean a 500-page “outline” for a 350-page novel. (For some it means one sentence: “I am writing a story about toxic friendship” or “…about a guy with a bagel.” If it’s enough for you, it’s enough, even if it makes no sense to anyone else.) And 2) Writers frequently-to-always know more about what happened before the story started, is happening as the story is going on, and will happen after the story ends, than ever gets into the story itself, or that ever should get into the story itself. It doesn’t all have to go in the outline, either.

I’m going to talk about types of story climaxes next week, because I already have that post and it’s relevant. I think.