Rob Kelley here, at the end of a revision cycle for a manuscript due to my publisher in January. This is the book Critical State, which is now planned as the first in a series of at least three books featuring the journalist protagonist Olivia Wolfe. This book will release in fall 2026 (and the next two in 2027 and 2028, respectively, which seems far away until you owe a manuscript!).

My publisher (High Frequency Press) had some heavy edit suggestions to the draft of the novel they’d seen a few months back, which meant I needed to rethink some major plot points. That resulted in adding three characters and deleting one, and replacing two POV characters with two others. Pretty big changes that required some major surgery. So, how do you do that and not have it end like the classic kid’s game Operation where if you touch the sides of the “wound” you lose, or in this case just end up with an editorial mess. Or a dead patient/book.

Reverse Outlining to the rescue! I’m more of a plotter in the plotter vs. pantser dichotomy. Were I a full-on pantser, I’d absolutely need to do a reverse outline at this stage. I’d have a huge mountain of prose from which I’d need to extract a throughline, identify arcs for characters, plots, and subplots, then take that pile of prose and fit it into a logical model.

But as more of a plotter, I only had to do half a reverses outline, taking my original outline and revising it to match my new goals. For those sections of the book that needed to be rewritten, I needed new outline points that addressed: 1) what had to happen in what order to make the plot work,  2) what characters would move that plot forward, and 3) whose POV would the resulting scenes be in?

I knew how the book had to end, and the big beats that needed to be hit, so I could insert placeholders that said something like: Riley needs to confront her superiors in the White House. Things X, Y, and Z happen. And this will be in Riley’s POV.

I use Scrivener to write my drafts, not moving to Word until I’m copyediting. I color code each scene by whose POV it is in, so I can move scenes around and consider rewriting a scene in a different POV if it gives it more punch (I just did that to a scene this week!)

Here you can see what my manuscript looks like in Scrivener, each scene named in the sidebar. (I don’t hold on to the chapter titles in the final manuscript but give them titles when I’m drafting so I know what goes there. Plus it’s fun.) If you squint hard enough you can also see that I use a three act structure with a midpoint as a large scale framework to help me think about character and plot progression and velocity.

Because I do it this way, when Riley character showed up, I knew what she had to do, and when she had to do it. I was able to use Scrivener to help me re-outline the book, then begin filling in where I needed new prose. Some things were changed by who Riley is and how she interacts with other characters, but those I fix when I get there.

More from me on Friday when I’ll be sharing my experience in producing the audiobook of Raven!

And a reminder that once again, in December, one lucky Maine Crime Writers reader who leaves a comment on the blog will win a bag of books!