Driving Backwards

On writing in the wrong direction to find the right one

In the campy 1986 sci-fi/horror/comedy/Gremlins-ripoff flick Critters, there is a scene where a couple of alien bounty hunters steal a police cruiser in order to reach a farmhouse being terrorized by the eponymous monsters from space. The aliens dispatch with the driver/passenger of the cruiser, adopt their appearances, and proceed to shift the vehicle into reverse before peeling away. They drive backwards all the way to the farmhouse because, having never operated a car before, they assumed that was the way it was done. It’s a funny moment.

I bring up this scene not because this is turning into a horror movie blog (a tempting idea!) but because this is how I started writing my novel draft back in 2016. I literally wrote one character’s story backwards, with one chapter happening later in time than the one that followed it. I started with one of the final events of the story, and pieced together the plot from there back to the beginning. I had never drafted a novel before, and that was just the order this one came to me in. Pedal to the metal.

Then, what started as a device just for me to get a handle on the story turned into THE operating conceit of the entire novel’s structure. I started building a novel that, for one key character, the reader experiences backwards, with revelations happening in that direction. I tried to build tension on the idea of “how did we get here?” rather then “what will happen next?” I drew from other stories that play with backward narrative, like Times Arrow by Martin Amis or the film Memento, convinced I could provide a fresh take on the idea. I wrote the whole damn book that way.

My infinitely patient writing colleagues and friends read through one chapter after another built on this premise. They provided honest feedback about which bits were confusing and which worked, with always just enough encouragement for me to keep going. For six years, it was a non-negotiable component of the novel for me. I stuck with it as something that, if you didn’t get it, the novel just wasn’t for you.

But wow, the logical knots I got tangled in for this hubris! The nights I spent just staring at my outline trying to make different pieces click. And — most crucially — the dramatic plot points that would have worked had they revealed themselves to the reader chronologically, but were completely confounding and opaque when presented backwards. Every now and then it felt like a neat trick (to me — and probably only me), but more than anything it was a gimmick that obscured the characters and their motivations, so that you only learned about why they did certain things long after you read about the actions.

From 2019 to 2022, I could barely work on it. This novel had ballooned to over 200,000 words and wasn’t finished yet, and huge swaths of it were written backwards. I had created an insane mess for myself, and given what else was happening at the time in the world (pandemic!) and my family life (children!), I had serious thoughts of abandoning the book altogether. Quitting seemed easier than fixing its glaring flaws.

I couldn’t shake the story though. I had fallen in love with this mess of a novel, and the idea of abandoning these people I’d created, with all of their challenges and triumphs, felt almost cruel. I had to do them justice.

So: I took the whole thing apart and put it back together in chronological order. I cut somewhere between 75-100K words, and kept only the parts I thought were good. Those sections needed to be completely rewritten to make sense, since I’d originally conceived them as present scenes pointing toward the next scene in the past. I spent 18 months turning the book into something so much better than it used to be.

And now it’s finished! Or, it’s as good as I know how to possibly make it right now. Hopefully I’ll be able to put it out into the world soon.

What’s the lesson here?

First, the lesson is not that it’s impossible to write a good novel with an unorthodox approach to time/structure/anything! I’m excited by novels that take weird risks, which is why I tried to write one. Maybe I’ll try another silly backwards novel one day. But that approach wasn’t right for this one.

The real lesson is to be honest with yourself about what isn’t working in a piece, and to reject inertia when it comes to making the big changes you need to make. It takes a long time to write a novel, so sometimes a decision you made half a decade ago can weave its way so deeply into the thing that it feels inoperable. But it’s not! It’s just words, and the author has control over every single one.

Writing, like any kind of creation, should involve play and experimentation and iteration. That’s where I derive the most fun out of the process, and a big reason I don’t outline before I start writing. Some of my absolute favorite things about my novel were things I surprised myself with, and that I had not even begun to conceive at the beginning.

But not every idea is a good one. Sometimes you need to backtrack, a long long way, and I’m here to say it’s worth doing that rather than abandoning the piece altogether. And even through all those deleted words and muttered curses, that backtracking is how you come to understand your novel better. Learning what doesn’t work is how you learn what does.

To me this is the heart of revision. The tough choices: not just the awkward sentences or cuttable chapters, but the seismic shifts in voice or point-of-view or tone or structure that can only happen after you’ve finally realized what the whole thing is really about. You might have to write a whole novel wrong — or backwards — to figure it all out. If you can put in the work to turn yourself around, you’ll make it to the farmhouse and defeat the evil Critters.