Even when a draft feels solid, reverse outlining is a powerful way to improve it. It helps you step back, evaluate the draft’s structure, and make sure every paragraph fits together to move your ideas forward. In contrast to outlining before writing, reverse outlining happens after the draft is complete. You read through your work, summarize each paragraph, and use those summaries to evaluate whether your ideas flow logically.
Reverse outlining fits naturally into the writing process as part of the revision stage. It is especially useful after completing your rough draft but before deeper rewriting. Through reverse outlining, you can take an objective look at your structure and revise it with intention.
I was doing something like this with Novel Writer until I moved to the new computer (and need to really read the manual again). There have been several rejections lately which mention problems of pacing in my short stories. I relate pacing to plot, which is mostly in my head, and the solution seemed to be getting the story where I could see its whole. I also have this problem where I get dug in so hard on the writing - the trees - that I do not see the forest. The more I read, the more it seemed to moving along the same direction I meant to go with Novel Writer (without re-reading the manual)
A reverse outline is an outline you create from a completed draft.
Instead of mapping ideas before writing, you work backward: Read each
paragraph, identify its main idea, and list those ideas as outline
bullets. This makes it easy to evaluate your writing’s structure, logic,
transitions, and how effectively each section supports your thesis.
***
The key benefits of reverse outlining include:
Clarifying structure by showing whether paragraphs appear in a logical order
Improving flow by revealing where transitions are weak or missing
Refining focus by showing whether each paragraph supports your thesis
Strengthening your argument by showing where evidence or explanations can be expanded
Simplifying the revision process by breaking large drafts into manageable parts
But this still seems a lot of work, and about the same time I came across the following:
Reverse outlining is especially valuable for essays, long reports, research writing, and personal narratives, where clarity and cohesion matter. It’s far from the only type of outline available to you, and it works best when combined with at least one other outlining strategy.
Looks like I need to find the time to re-read Novel Writer's manual, and this might be a solution to the problems with my short stories (my dour content feeds a host of other problems).
I have been thinking of colonization for quite some time. It could run back to the early Eighties when I looked at the effects of General Motors on Anderson, Indiana. My hometown was a colony of GM, its fate depended on what happened in GM's boardrooms. If I can ever get done with "Chasing Ashes", colonization will be one of its themes.
With my interest in colonization, decolonization has attracted my attention. Reading John Aziz's The Infinite Reopening of History (Quillette) gives me much to think about. My judgment is that neo-decolonialism is both impossible and immoral.
It’s important to make a clear distinction between actual
decolonisation and what I am calling neo-decolonialism. Real
decolonisation was a concrete, historically specific process in which
empires withdrew from territories they had been administering, as
exemplified by the end of the Raj. These withdrawals changed legal and
political realities on the ground: e.g. British colonial governance in
India ended, and two new sovereign states, India and Pakistan, emerged.
This
is not to say that the end of empire erased the effects of colonialism.
Political borders, legal systems, and economic structures often
outlived the formal withdrawal, and many societies still live with deep,
measurable legacies of colonialism. It is one thing to argue for civil
rights, equal representation, or institutional reform within an existing
civic order.
But neo-decolonialism is not about dismantling real
empires—even though some empires still exist today, such as the Russian
Federation and the People’s Republic of China. Instead, it retroactively
reclassifies political arrangements as “colonial” based on contemporary
group dynamics, racial or ethnic categories (e.g. “whiteness”), and the
question of which side has the most power.
In the neo-decolonial
model, you don’t need an actual empire. Some vestigial remnants of a
historical empire will do—hence you can take issue with the European
colonisation of the Americas, or even the waves of continental migration
to the British isles, or Scottish migration to the island of Ireland.
Then you draw lines: one side is framed as indigenous; the other becomes
“settler-colonial.”
Yep, no way that we cannot call America a settler-colonial state.
In most of the rest of the world, too, history is messy. There are
migrations, conquests, intermarriages, conversions, displacements, and
returns. Empires rise and fall; borders are drawn and redrawn; peoples
are renamed, identities are invented and reinvented.
Of course, we
don’t live in a perfectly equal world and some groups of people have
legitimate grievances. Some historical injustices have long knock-on
effects. Examples include the ongoing legacy of Jim Crow in the United
States, the structural problems created by caste in India, and the fact
that many postcolonial states inherited borders and institutions that
were never designed for stable self-government.
But there’s a
difference between acknowledging and addressing real injustices in a
legal and democratic way—for example in the framework based on equality
and dignity established by Dr Martin Luther King Jr— and adopting an
ideology that seeks to deconstruct whole societies—or even the entire
world—in the name of decoloniality through “resistance,” which in this
context is a euphemism for violence.
And unless you are a full-blown MAGA idiot, you recognize not just the injustices mentioned above but also others. If not, go read Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Read the Korematsu case.
Where there are injustices, the question has to be how to provide justice? Here, I find the answer decolonization provides (as put forth in the essay) is wrong:
In a neo-decolonial framework, the questions become: who is authentic, who is indigenous, who is tainted, who is settler-colonial? Once you take that approach, rights and democracy become secondary. Because the real issue becomes the question of who has the right to exist in a place at all. This, ultimately, is the logic of 7 October and the logic of Frantz Fanon. Once civilians can be reclassified as “settlers,” atrocities can be narrated as “decolonisation.” In the worldview inspired by Fanon, violence is cleansing and regenerative. It “restores” the colonised subject. It can remake a people, rebuild a nation. It is supposed to turn humiliation into dignity through acts of terror. In such a vision, violence against innocents is both permitted and sanctified.
Denying history is the route taken by cowards and others possessing bad consciences.
We need to recognize the injustices of our history. Then we need to ask if we have remedied those injustices. If we have not, then we must decide how we will remedy the wrongs done by our past.
Performing the same acts of injustice done by those who were unjust is nothing more than another form of injustice - hate breeding hate does not provide life, only more death.
In that time, I have added to "One Dead Blonde" and compiled the "Chasing Ashes" scraps into a sample.
I finished my research project yesterday.
There was church on Sunday; the grocery last night and the convenience store on Saturday. No other traveling; today I have not even left the apartment.
Getting ready for a medical procedure tomorrow has left me tired, and I have been spending too much time today sleeping.
I spent time on Tubi, but I cannot rightly think of what all I saw except American Gods.
I will leave you with the scraps of the past few days.
Eventually, a life-threatening illness led him to completely reassess his career and pursue his real musical passion, the blues: he claimed that during his recuperation from the operation that saved his life but left him without a pancreas and in permanently poor health, he’d had an epiphany after finding an old Sister Rosetta Tharpe album in a drawer, bursting into tears at the sight of it. When his label rejected his 2002 album Dancing Down the Stony Road (“because it hadn’t been compromised in any way”), and suggested he make a big-name-packed duets album instead, he walked away from his deal, set up his own record company and happily saw out the rest of his career making and self-releasing the music he wanted to.
He should have gotten more recognition.
Movies I want to see - reviews from RogerEbert.com
The Testament of Ann Lee - if we're needing the weird to overturn our stagnation, then his sounds like a good start, and yet:
And this remembrance is both in the intention and the failures of “The
Testament of Ann Lee.” Fastvold’s film feels like a tribute, an act of
instilling memory. And yet, I’d be dishonest to say that the film, on
the whole, was very memorable. It is most certainly an expert display of
craft: the script is generally nimble, the visuals are stunning, and
the choreography is moving. But it is bloated in history and starving
for persona. Ann Lee was pious and dedicated, but in this film’s
depiction, not much else. Therefore, the extended chapters of the film’s
framework become repetitive, as do its themes. There isn’t a single
performance in the bunch that can touch Seyfried’s, leaving the film
aching for chemistry.
The Choral because I saw a preview and I agree with this:
We need the gift of new narratives to help us imagine beyond present
circumstances. While “The Choral” may be riddled with a few too many
false notes for comfort, the purity of its song and message make it a
hard tune to disregard.
A name to conjure another day and age, even if I barely knew or remember the person to which it is attached: Twiggy.
Dear Samuel, Thank
you for submitting your short story “Going for the Kid” to Gemini
Magazine. It was definitely action packed and fast paced. Unfortunately
it is not quite right for us at this time but we appreciate the
opportunity to evaluate your work. Please consider us for new work in the future. Thank you again. Frances Wiedenhoeft, Reader Gemini Magazine
Like Professor Lee, Khan finds that the
best Christmas murder mysteries offer a challenge and are
thought-provoking. But they’re also based on the reality of family
holidays. “You’ve got these seething things going on under the surface,”
he says. “Crime fiction takes that one step further: You bump someone
off. Normally, we’ll just have a fight at Christmas, a sulk, and not
speak to each other for a year.”
At their heart, Christmas murder mysteries are morality tales, he says. Using the holidays and an endearing detective to highlight the good and bad in human nature as we head toward a new year.
The
terrorist attack at Bondi Beach on 14 December has prompted the shock
and grief any society would expect, but I fear that the accompanying
public conversation will follow an unproductive and yet familiar
pattern. The focus will rapidly shift away from questions of ideology or
communal attitudes and toward explanations that require little cultural
introspection, such as the existence of “blind hatred” and “ignorance.”
Commentators will no doubt emphasise the supposedly individual
pathology of the perpetrators and urge restraint, while politicians will
warn against division, call for unity, and double down on “anti-racism”
programmes.
This is fundamentally misguided. If we hope to
prevent further violence, we must trace the roots of the Bondi attack
with clarity, since any solution divorced from those roots is destined
to fail. Over the past several years, there have been many signs that
antisemitism in Australia is becoming more visible and, in some places,
clearly linked to ideological and theological beliefs. Much of this has
appeared within pockets of the Muslim community committed to a strident
interpretation of Islam.
***
In his well-known critique of American multiculturalism, The Disuniting
of America, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. notes that a system that
encourages the preservation of strong communal identities can also
import longstanding antagonisms. These do not dissolve simply because
they have been relocated. Australia’s experience over the past year
suggests something similar. A commitment to inclusion has been
interpreted as a requirement to avoid discussing conflicts that arise
from divergent and incommensurable worldviews. The assumption is that
harmony can be maintained if difficult topics are kept out of public
view. This has the short-term advantage of reducing political tension,
but it also creates a long-term vulnerability by encouraging collective
blindness.
More rejections came in.
From 12/28:
Thank you for submitting your work to MudRoom for review. We are grateful for the opportunity to engage with your writing and thinking. Unfortunately, we do not have a place in our upcoming issue for "Agnes." We hope it finds a loving home.
This is the only one ever to address me without my name:
Dear Writer,
Thank you so much for submitting your piece to The Hemlock Journal!
We appreciate the opportunity to review your entry, but we regret to inform you that at this moment, it doesn’t align with our vision for this particular issue.
After careful consideration, we want to acknowledge the quality of your piece, and the creativity it reflects. However, due to various factors in our selection process, it did not make it to the final round this time. Please know this was a difficult decision, as your work truly stood out.
We highly encourage you to submit this entry to other journals, where it might be a better fit. Thank you for trusting us with your craft.
We encourage you to continue sharing your writing with us in the future, as we truly admire your talent and dedication to the craft. Thank you for trusting us with your work, and we wish you the very best in all your literary endeavors.
We are grateful
that you trusted ANMLY with "Coming Home," however, our readers felt
that this particular packet was not a good fit, and we will be unable to
publish it. We wish you luck in placing this elsewhere.
Two pieces from Englesberg Ideas are being mashed together in this post. Selected subconsciously or not, bear with me.
One looks at Europe and Russia; the other only considers China. The more Trump denigrates NATO and allies, the more I keep wanting to ask this question: who won World War Two?
Not us. The United Nations led by America, Great Britain, the USSR, and China won World War II.
The red teams mentioned in the first essay should be applied to the maritime problems outlined in the second; the allies favored in the second are needed for the problem of Russia.
This sense of a ‘prewar era’ has only become more urgent as senior
officials and officers across the Euro-Atlantic community point to the
possibility of a Russian attack on NATO within the foreseeable
future. Primarily, the new approach has focused on increased defence
spending. Thinking about the challenge, though, tends towards updates of
the past, framing the broader picture either as a ‘return to the Cold
War’ or revisiting the Nazi assault on Europe of the late 1930s, and the
specific one of a Russian assault on the Baltic States.
Very often, however, these are echoes and versions of debates that the
Euro-Atlantic community has had for the last 20 years: a new Cold War.
And all too often, the discussion about the late 1930s returns to the
well-worn analogies of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.
In
fact, 1937 offers another apt reference point for lessons about evolving
strategic challenges and deterrence and defence: this was the year that
then-Colonel Arthur Percival,
a well-connected, decorated and upwardly mobile British officer, wrote
an ‘appreciation’ of a potential attack on Singapore from the Japanese
point of view. Following on-site inspections in Singapore and Malaya,
Percival observed that such tremendous change had taken place
concerning the whole problem of the defence of the naval base at
Singapore that it could no longer be considered an impregnable fortress.
Instead, the base would be in imminent danger if war broke out.
***
‘Our 1937 moment’ means shaping an appreciation of a potential attack on
NATO from the Russian point of view and acting on it. The long-serving
baseline scenario of a Russian invasion of the Baltic States appears to
be the most complex and potentially costly of options open to Moscow
given the terrain and NATO’s defensive preparations. So, why would it
work this way, and what are Moscow’s alternatives? How do Moscow’s
changing international partnerships influence this, if at all? Answers
to these questions will go a long way to mitigating the perennial
Euro-Atlantic sense of surprise about Moscow’s actions, and to ensuring
that deterrence and defence remain not just up-to-date, but ready for
the future.
(Which should also seriously under the idea of a conspiracy underlying the Pearl Harbor attack - the British military made similar mistakes regarding Japan.)
Realistically, building a commercial maritime-industrial base to
compete with China’s would require vast sums of money. This would not be
a one-time expenditure for retooling outdated shipyards and modernising
crane factories. Grants and loans to manufacturers are only part of the
story. Higher wages – which ultimately would be funded by larger public
subsidies for commercial vessels – would be needed to attract workers
into an industry they have shunned. Selling that industry’s products
would entail a readiness to provide public-sector financing to
shipowners – and to accept stunning losses when difficult economic
conditions cause owners to default on their mortgages and leases.
International collaboration to produce ships and maritime equipment at
costs even remotely comparable to China’s cannot be taken for granted:
shipyards tend to be large employers, and any government that will cede
the jobs of well-paid workers represented by powerful labour unions is
brave indeed.
Would approaching commercial shipbuilding as a
collective venture diminish America’s standing as a great power? Hardly.
Shipping is a thoroughly globalised industry, and no one worries about
where a vessel was built. Nor would cooperation with friends and allies
on maritime matters diminish the country’s ability to project force,
deter adversaries and secure sea lanes. Nationalism has not served the
maritime industry well, it is not likely to succeed in sustaining a
defence against China’s challenge.
I got distracted the other day with a question about how Orthodox Christianity deals with Nietzsche and vice versa. YouTube gave me a better answer than what I found elsewhere. What seems to be clear is that Orthodoxy contains ideas that have not been considered by Western philosophy.
In Nietzsche’s eyes, truly noble spirits refuse to be the prisoners of
their own principles. Instead, they treat their own most cherished
opinions with a certain cavalier detachment, adopting and discarding
them at will. It is what Yeats, who like many a modernist felt the
influence of Nietzsche, and for whom opinions were fit meat for bank
clerks and shopkeepers, called sprezzatura. One’s beliefs are
more like one’s manservants, to be hired and fired as the fancy takes
you, than like one’s bodily organs. They are not to be regarded as
constitutive of personal identity, but rather as costumes one can don or
doff at will. For the most part, as with kilts and cravats, it is
aesthetic considerations that govern the donning and doffing. The
left-wing historian A. J. P. Taylor once informed an Oxford Fellowship
election committee that he had extreme political views, but held them
moderately. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche scorns what he calls
the “longing for certainty” of science and rationalism, an itch for
epistemological assurance behind which it is not hard to detect a
deep-seated anxiety of spirit. In his view, the compulsion to believe is
for those who are too timid to exist in the midst of ambiguities
without anxiously reaching out for some copper-bottomed truth. The
desire for religion is the craving for an authority whose emphatic “thou
shalt” will relieve us of our moral and cognitive insecurity. The free
spirit, by contrast, is one that has the courage to dispense with “every
wish for certainty,” supporting itself only by “slender cords and
possibilities,” yet dancing even so on the verge of the abyss.
***
If religious faith were to be released from the burden of furnishing social orders with a set of rationales for their existence, it might be free to rediscover its true purpose as a critique of all such politics. In this sense, its superfluity might prove its salvation. The New Testament has little or nothing to say of responsible citizenship. It is not a “civilized” document at all. It shows no enthusiasm for social consensus. Since it holds that such values are imminently to pass away, it is not greatly taken with standards of civic excellence or codes of good conduct. What it adds to common morality is not some supernatural support, but the grossly inconvenient news that our forms of life must undergo radical dissolution if they are to be reborn as just and compassionate communities. The sign of that dissolution is a solidarity with the poor and powerless. It is here that a new configuration of faith, culture, and politics might be born.
My thesis is very simple: the use of the word “traditionalist” and
its derivative forms (“Orthodox morality,” “traditional values”) is
philosophically untenable, i.e., it’s wrong.
Why? Because we are all traditionalists. How? Because it is impossible
to exist as a human being without tradition. Put another way,
traditionless existence is impossible. Put yet another way, humans exist
not simply in and through, but as tradition.
If this
thesis is unexpected, what may be more shocking is the fact that it’s
actually been around for a long time; I’m definitely not the first to
articulate it. I’m simply repeating an axiom that has gained a fairly
wide philosophical consensus and was probably most famously articulated
by the philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre,
whose work many of the so-called traditionalists appropriate. They do
so selectively, because they fail to mention that for MacIntyre,
everything is tradition, even the liberalism against which the
“traditionalists” self-define. The fact that liberal democracy itself is
a tradition sustained by particular civic practices was definitively
shown by the Princeton philosopher, Jeffrey Stout.
***
One thing is for certain: the non-religious would, at least, consider
me a traditionalist; but, their use of the term is simply the flip side
of the bad religious use of the term. Again, it’s not about being a
traditionalist versus a non-traditionalist; it’s about identifying what
kind of traditionalist we are. For the record, I am an Incarnational
traditionalist. I suspect those with whom I disagree on what is
discussable in the Orthodox tradition share this epistemic
presupposition. Our real debate is over the acceptable amount of
diversity that can exist among those who share a common dogmatic
tradition.
We should, thus, recognize our common presuppositions;
affirm those common presuppositions, especially the dogmas, as ground
rules for debate; and we need to stop using words like “traditionalist,”
“traditional values,” and “Orthodox morality,” which only obfuscate
what we share in common or, at worst, become rhetorical tools for
demonization. These words are conversation stoppers, which, for anyone
who knows the history of Christianity, is actually antithetical to the
living Tradition.
It is the loss of this commonality that is playing out in modern American politics.
Father Bulgakov’s training as a Marxist economist eventually led him to
disavow its anti-personalism and its suppression of human freedom. He
described the Marxist economic concept of history as“a funeral dirge sung for the person and personal creativity” (Karl Marx as a Religious Type,
52).While returning to the Orthodox Church and subsequent ordination to
the priesthood, Bulgakov sought to articulate a philosophy and theology
of economics that refuted the Marxist concept of homo economicus while placing economics within the realms of Christology, sophiology and eschatology (Philosophy of Economy,
especially pages 123-156). This meant economics should not be studied
either in isolation or as the basis upon which all aspects of human life
depend. Rather, economics had to be placed within a theological context
that eschews the extremes of hedonism and asceticism (see “The Economic Ideal”).
For Bulgakov, it is the Church that navigates between these extremes
along with their derivatives – luxury and involuntary poverty – and
provides the concrete grounding for how economics can be used as an
agent for restoring the culture and spiritual integrity of a local
community and/or a nation.
***
The “battle for the rights of the human spirit” is synonymous with the battle for human freedom. Working to articulate a via media
that avoids the anti-materialism of asceticism and the hedonism of
materialism, Bulgakov draws attention to the relationship that “human
value and spiritual expansion” have with acquiring the necessary
material demands for living that in turn allow for the development of
democracy.
…the
increasing sense of human value and the spiritual expansion of
personality inevitably express itself in the expansion of material
demand: we have a good example of this in the whole contemporary
movement towards democracy. (“Economic Ideal,” 48)
The
democracy Father Bulgakov prophesizes envisions an economics that does
not systematize poverty but creates a culture that allows and protects
the development of the person by avoiding the communitarianism of
socialism and the individualism of capitalism. This is the difficult
path Bulgakov sets before the Orthodox Church. This is the path that
places the Church in a vulnerable position as it upholds the freedom,
honor and glory of the human person.
Which is why I remain a democrat - it values humanity.
And this I think gives us a new understanding of Montaigne’s title: Essays. Essays are, in Montaigne’s French, not yet ‘essays’; they are assays, trials, tests, experiments. Take away belief,
whether in philosophy or religion, and what do you have left? What you
have is your own enquiring mind. Montaigne is the first modern because
he is the first (although there were some classical precedents) to find
himself without belief, at which point man becomes the measure of all
things, endlessly trying and testing but never finding an eternal
foundation. Montaigne is, in Richard Rorty’s language, the first
anti-foundationalist. It is precisely because he is not a believer that
Montaigne is constantly in movement, always adding, revising, rewriting,
unable to settle. Had Montaigne been a pious Catholic the Essays
would never have been written; they are, as it were, the record of his
failure to believe (except, of course, in friendship). They are also a
guide for readers, readers whom Montaigne assumes will be pratiquant but not necessarily croyant.
(He is impatient with those who practise Protestantism while believing
in the truth of Catholicism, or vice versa; there is no similar
condemnation of those who practise without having any belief.)
To
chronicle himself, Montaigne, the most conservative of thinkers,
invented a new literary form. Malcolm Smith writes wonderfully about
him, but he thinks and writes like a Roman censor, albeit a highly
civilised one; to do Montaigne justice one would have to write like
Montaigne, one would have to assay the Essays. And perhaps that
too, like Montaigne’s constant, quiet distinguishing between belief and
practice, can only be done indirectly, as in Carlo Ginzburg’s wonderful essay
‘The Soul of Brutes’, where Montaigne’s famous line ‘When I am playing
with my cat how do I know that it is not rather she who is playing with
me?’ is of course present even though it is, like Montaigne’s Jewish
ancestry in the Essays, never mentioned.
Rara temporum felicitate, ubi sentire quae velis, et quae sentias dicere licet. (Tacitus)
‘Happy the day when you can think what you like and say what you
think.’ It’s comparatively easy to write about authors who think what
they like and say what they think. The Essays presents itself
as such a book; it isn’t, which is why it is difficult to write about
it. In my yard the pools of water have sunk into the Suffolk sand. And
yet ‘There are figures from the past that time seems to bring closer and
closer to us. Montaigne is one such figure.’ (Ginzburg) Writing about
Montaigne is difficult, but surely not, in these times of conflict and
uncertainty, impossible.
I need to get back to reading Montaigne, just as I need to get away from this computer!
