The power of working backward
People say, "Hindsight is 20/20," meaning that even the most confusing moments and choices look perfectly clear once you've gotten through to the other side. I have excellent news - writers have the gift of hindsight! Writers know when someone is making a choice that will lead to bad consequences, or good ones. We know the moment and method of people's deaths. We know whether the interview will lead to a job, whether the kid got on the soccer team, and whether the marriage will last.
Knowing how your story ends is like a superpower. It allows you to see what needs to happen to make the ending work. When plotting stories, working backward allows you to:
- sustain logic
- build tension
- develop subplots
- intertwine stories
And create arcs that reveal which traits and items your characters will need for their journeys.
If you know that the outcome of your story is that the cop and the criminal become friends, then you know certain things that will probably have to happen to get you there:
- they meet
- they assert/enact their differences
- they have something in common that matters
- they are forced to work together/rely on each other
...or some other string of events that bring our cop and criminal into alignment.
If you know where to start and how it ends
Like I've pointed out before – If you know at the beginning of the story that your main character is a young man growing up on a farm, and you know that by the end he will become a Jedi warrior – then you can know in advance the skills and traits he might need to accomplish this transition.
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If you know who a character is and what they want when they start out and who they are and what they want at the end of the story, you have a lot of information about what would have to happen to change them. Look at those last moments and puzzle out how they got there. Work backward to figure out:
- which items they'll need on their journey
- what tests they'll need to pass
- who they'll need to meet
- what they'll need to find/discover/uncover
- where they'll need to go
- why they do things the way they do them
And so much more.
It's the journey, not the destination
We think life would be easier if we knew the outcomes of our choices in advance. We imagine that it'd be a lot easier to decide whether to ask someone out if you already knew their response. Whether to take that job, move to a new city, change your major, have children – it feels like all of these choices would be easier if we knew what they'd lead to and how things would turn out.
There are some of us who turn to the last page of a book before starting, but most of us prefer the not-knowing. The wondering. The figuring it out as we go along. Though we all love a great ending – we read books, watch movies, and love stories for the stuff between "Once upon a time..." and "the end."
We want to join characters as they:
- seek out a person, place, or thing
- solve a mystery
- learn a skill
- resolve an issue/relationship from the past
- experience a catharsis
- accomplish a goal
- learn a life lesson
And more. Figure out who your characters are at the end of the story then work backward to figure out who they’ll need to be to get there and what traits and items they’ll need.
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Example: The Wizard of Oz
- Scarecrow longs for a brain
- Tin Man needs a heart
- Lion lacks courage
- Dorothy wants to go home
- The Great and Powerful Oz needs to own his truth
Working backward from those goals provides character arcs for Dorothy and her travel companions as they earn the things they’ll need – or discover they had them all along.
This video from a course I created goes into the process a bit more.
Subscribers, please enjoy more of this video where I go in depth using an example of working backward in my role as Lara Lee in Django Unchained to create story arcs and character details.
