{"id":166,"date":"2012-07-20T09:31:57","date_gmt":"2012-07-20T13:31:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hivewordhq.com\/?p=166"},"modified":"2012-07-20T09:31:57","modified_gmt":"2012-07-20T13:31:57","slug":"reverse-engineering-your-novel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hivewordhq.com\/reverse-engineering-your-novel\/","title":{"rendered":"Reverse Engineering Your Novel"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Stickies<\/a>One of the nice things about working on the Writer’s Knowledge Base<\/a> is that I see A LOT of writing articles pass by. I don’t have time to read all of them, of course, but M.E. Summer’s post “Kate Beckett\u2019s Murder Board: Reverse Engineering Your Story<\/a>” caught my eye just from the title alone. “Reverse Engineering.” Hey, that’s a technical term and I’m a technical guy (plus I probably know what she’s going to say and it’s right up my alley.) Then, there’s this “Murder Board” thing and that puppy sounds interesting!<\/p>\n

Check out M.E.’s post and then come back. (I’ll start the Jeopardy music…)<\/p>\n

Nice post, right?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I thought so, too. I’ve been thinking about this stuff a lot due to my work on my novel writing software<\/a> so I knew about the nature of the issues in the post. However, I came away with an observation and a question for myself:<\/p>\n

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  1. “Reverse engineering” your story is outlining after the fact<\/li>\n
  2. Could Hiveword solve the presented issues?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Outlining after the fact<\/h2>\n

    If you reverse engineer your story you are effectively making an outline from what you wrote pantser-style. Then, you examine the outline and look for a broad range of problems. That’s cool if you want to work backwards like that but it leads to what I’ve been calling rework.<\/p>\n

    Outlining first or after the fact ends up with the same artifact (an outline) so there’s no loss there. Doing it after the fact is naturally faster. I should say\u00a0seemingly<\/em> faster but I’ll get to that in a moment. Then, you study your reverse engineered outline and look for problems. M.E. mentioned some of the ones she looks for:<\/p>\n