Reverse Engineer Your Vision

Try Taking It Apart Before You Put It Together

Happy February, Shelf Life fam. I’m glad January is out of the way. February is cruel but at least it’s short. I love it when the first Shelf Life of the month falls on the first day of the month. It feels very neat and tidy that way. March will be even better because the first Shelf Life of the month will fall on the first day of March and the last Shelf Life of the month will fall on the last day of March. I’m really looking forward to March for this reason. And also thawing.

Today’s article contains mild spoilers for Fight Club (1999), of all things, so be warned.

This topic arose from a conversation I recently had with a colleague and friend with whom I am working on a big initiative. It’s her initiative and I kind of horned my way into it, to tell you the truth, because I heard there were processes to be developed and documentation to be drafted and those are a few of my favorite things. 

The project requirements are unwieldy because several different user groups ultimately need to share one solution for requesting specific services for the team that are then assigned to the correct resource to fill. It was a lot of building forms with branching logic and automated task assignments and user instructions for various parts of the workflow. Anyway, we figured it out.

While we were working on it, my friend commented that there were a lot of moving pieces to plan for and I told her my secret weapon for projects like this: Envision your ideal solution—fix that sucker in your mind—and then reverse engineer it.

I know a little bit about reverse engineering because I was once married to an engineer, a situation I do not recommend, and during that time I became adept at taking apart the things an engineer had put together, like ill-considered movie  organization systems (chronologic by director!?) and the marriage. I’m joking but also not.

Reverse engineering is the process of taking something apart to see how it was made. This is also sometimes called product teardown and, in chemistry, deformulation. When you want to know the secret of how somebody made or did something, and they’re not telling, you take the thing they made or did and disassemble it down to its smallest component parts to get a sense of what pieces went into it and how they went together. 

Reverse engineering is mainly used for things like devices and software. In the practical sense, it is things that were engineered in the first place that can be un-engineered. Dis-engineered. Like my love life.

However: Today, all kinds of things are called engineering. The traditional types of engineer that require education and certification to hang out a shingle are those like electrical, mechanical, civil,  biomedical, nuclear, software, and so on. Now there’s user experience engineering, social engineering, financial engineering. Why not manuscript engineering? Why be an author when you can be a book engineer? A bookgineer.

(Turanga Leela voice: “I don’t see you with a fungineering degree.”)

Engineering means using scientific principles to design and build things: Machines, structures, processes. But engineering also means to plan or design something using skill and craft. An engineer is a person with an engineering degree who designs machines but also “a person who carries through an enterprise by skillful or artful contrivance.” All words mean more than one thing. 

Nuh uh, not sesquipedalian or triskaidekaphobia, those only mean one thing each. But engineer and engineering mean lots of things. Planning, designing, and creating something using skill, craft, or art is engineering as much as using scientific principles and, like, soldering irons and printed circuit boards. 

How does the principle of reverse engineering apply to writing? You can apply anything to writing if you try hard enough. That’s called applied engineering. 

Sometimes when you read you get completely blown away by a story or a technique. Sometimes so much that you flip back to page one and immediately begin again. For me this usually happens when a story surprises me in a satisfying way or when a story has a lot of different elements that all come together in perfect harmony by the end. If you’ve ever finished a book and put it down and thought to yourself, “That was amazing, how did the author do it?” That’s an opportunity to reverse engineer the story to suss out the author’s technique.

The second way I use reverse engineering in writing is when I have a perfect vision for a story but the reality of the draft is falling short of my expectations for it, which is always, every single draft, every time. I don’t know if it’s like that for anyone else but when I conceive an idea for a story of any length it always comes packed with multiple universal themes, interleaved layers of meaning, vivid imagery, and clever and beautiful language—but then when I write it it’s just word vomit. I think I’m painting the Mona Lisa but actually it comes out a weird stick figure with hair. When this happens (literally every time), I can reverse engineer my original vision for the story to figure out what’s missing and how to close the gap between vision and reality.

Let’s talk about both.

Reverse Engineering Another Writer

When you go to college and get a degree in English Literature, you learn a lot about pulling writing apart to its components and examining them but not for the purpose of figuring out what you liked about it. Nobody cares if you liked it or not. It’s the required reading. Three thousand years of dead white men have lessons for you and you are going to learn them. Having met my lifetime obligation to read “classics” I now only read things because I want to, for enjoyment or some other type of enrichment, but never because I “ought to.” This is the way.

I do still use the literature teardown I learned in school to think about why I like what I like, a skillset I described in previous Shelf Life article Learn to Read. Today I will go stepwise through the reverse engineering process to share  exactly how I apply this when I’m reading like a writer, for the specific purpose of improving my own work through emulation.

First, identify whatever it is you want to unpack and learn from. If you already know the exact technique you want to learn (for example, “how does this author describe characters?”) then you’re ahead of the game. I sometimes finish a book and just have a sense of “wow” that I have to chip away at to figure out, first, what it was, exactly, that wowed me. There are some broad headings these techniques might fall under, which include:

• Plot and story structure

• Character development

• Descriptions

• Narrative or character voice(s)

When I’ve identified the broad heading I can start refining. How did the author give so many prominent characters distinct voices? (Six of Crows.) How did the author keep two complete, separate-but-related stories well-balanced throughout the novel? (Possession.) One of my favorite techniques to study whenever I encounter it is a story that surprises me at the end but which, on further consideration or rereading, I realize showed me up front what was going on but in a subtle way that I didn’t pick up on.

Whatever it is you want to learn, once you’ve identified it, read it (or reread it) again—twice, if you can. Once at your normal leisure-reading pace to absorb the content or refresh your memory, and once at a slow and deliberate pace, considering each passage, stopping to make notes. You might be reading specific sections from one book; specific sections from a couple of books by the same author; or even a whole book or books—if the latter, you probably don’t have time to read everything multiple times (who has that much time?). As you get comfortable with reverse engineering, you can put it into practice on the fly. When you’re reading something that’s impressing you, slow down right then and start making notes. 

Break the technique down to its components. Take my example above of a story that surprises at the end in spite of giving the reader all the pertinent information up front: As I read through the second time, I write down all the things that I now realize, with hindsight, were openly informing me about the later reveal. This is like watching Fight Club for the second time, now knowing who Tyler Durden is, and seeing all the instances in which other characters react when Tyler and the narrator interact with each other.

Look at where, when, and how the author uses the component parts. How early or late in the story do they place the descriptive details? What mechanism do they use to place them? Dialogue? Exposition? In tightly written prose, almost every details is doing double or triple duty. When the author drops in a descriptive detail and you learn something about how a character looks, what else are they telling you with that detail? Anything?

I’m thinking of Karou in Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor, who has bright blue hair that grows out of her head that way because she used a shing, a minor wish she obtained from her adoptive father, the Wishmonger Brimstone. That is a lot of information you’re getting alongside “girl have blue hair.”

Reverse Engineering Your Idea or Vision

This technique is a little bit harder. When you’re working with someone else’s story, you have a complete, fixed “machine” to take apart and examine. Your own vision for a story, or a story idea, is fluid. Trying to grab it to start pulling it apart sometimes just squishes it around and maybe gets idea juice in the carpet.

First, fix your vision in as solid a form as you can by making a list of its components. Think about your vision for the story. What things do you see it having, when you picture it in your mind, that are most important? These can be concrete things, like “a close sibling relationship” or “an unreliable narrator.” They can be conceptual things, like “intersectional themes of shifting between ‘us’ and ‘other’.” They can be structural things, like “scenes that alternate between the present and the past.” As many things as you can identify as being important to your idea—write them down.

I do this vision-fixing process lying on my bed, or the sofa, or sometimes the floor, eyes open and staring at the ceiling. My partner has thought I was asleep, unconscious, or dead more than once when I was just working on my writing.

Look at where you are now with your draft. Maybe you have no draft, maybe you have a draft already, maybe you’ve been through a few rounds of revision but there’s still something you’re not nailing. If you have a draft, read through it as critically as you can (it helps if you have some distance from it) and make a list of the components from your vision that it does have. If you don’t have a draft, you already have a list of the components you don’t have in it yet—all of them—so you can skip the next step.

Next up is the time-honored business tradition of the gap analysis. Compare your lists to see which components are in your vision but missing from your draft. Distill this to a shorter list of only that which is missing. You only get to do this easy step if you already put the work into your draft.

Finally, last but not least (last but most), make an action plan to add the missing components into your draft, or to include these components when you draft. I have to be honest: Even when I do this process ahead of starting a draft, most or all of the magic happens during revision. I can usually get the concrete stuff in on a first draft but conceptual stuff like theme, motif, symbolism, metaphor, foreshadowing—that all goes in later after analysis of the chasm between how I first envisioned this story and how it came out when I wrote it.

This happens all the time with Shelf Life, too, by the way. I have grand plans all the time for these topics but there’s only so much time, and only so much space, metaphorically anyway. I could keep talking all day but no one has time for that.

Wishing you a mild February. A couple of good topics are to come shortly. My brain has been working overtime just for you.

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