The Time-Traveling Writer’s Secret Weapon

How Memento (2000) can help the pantsers among us

Image from the IMDB page on Memento(2000)

Writers split, broadly, into two types: plotters and pantsers. Architects and gardeners.

Plotters know every detail of every character before they write a single word. When they write, they’re converting their plans into written form.

Pantsers sit down to write without much of an idea where things are going.

I’ve always been a pantser, and it’s always been a problem.

Non-members can read this article here.

Fellow pansters will know the sinking feeling that comes along after a while. You’ve crafted compelling characters. You’ve built some intriguing situations.

You might be thousands of words into what has often felt like your best work yet.

And then you hit… the Wall.

Another brick in the Wall

Your characters are still talking and moving and doing things — but they’re desperately treading water.

Nothing is moving toward anything meaningful. Your plot threads are tangling and dangling in the wind, instead of weaving together like they should. Your story has fizzled out into a mess.

This is the pantser’s dilemma. We excel at organic character development and natural dialogue. We struggle with structure and endings.

The freedom to explore and discover through writing is our greatest strength. But it becomes a fatal weakness when the story needs to actually be finished.

Enter Christopher Nolan’s film Memento (2000). It contains the answer to everything.

We can have our pants-cake, and we can eat it too.

Oligatory thumbnail refresher for the movie. It came out — gulp — 25 years ago now.

Memento (2000) follows Leonard Shelby, a man with short-term memory loss hunting his wife’s killer.

What made Memento revolutionary was Nolan’s decision to structure the entire narrative in reverse chronological order. Each scene reveals what happened before the previous scene. It creates suspense not through “what’s going to happen next” but through “what happened before”.

It was the film’s fundamental storytelling technique rather than just a clever gimmick.

It forced viewers to piece together information gradually: every revelation recontextualized everything they thought they knew. The ending became the beginning. Understanding flowed backwards through time.

Now. What if writers — pantsers or not — borrowed the Memento technique?

Not as a plot device, but solely as a composition tool for themselves?

The Reverse Writing Process

Instead of writing toward an ending, imagine crafting a story by writing its ending first and working backwards to the start, writing each scene as you go.

Take a simple romance:

• Boy meets girl.
• Boy wins girl.
• Girl runs off with her fitness instructor.

You write the final scene of this story first. You can still pants it. Still merrily sit down and throw prose paint at the wall and see what sticks.

Alison leaves the shared apartment with two suitcases while her boyfriend Carl begs her not to go. She drives away with Mick, her personal trainer, leaving Carl devastated on the doorstep.

In traditional storytelling, you’d begin with Carl and Alison meeting, trace their relationship’s development, introduce Mick, build tension, and culminate in the departure.

But what if you started with writing that final scene, with no more preparation than this, and worked backwards?

• Scene 1 (Written First): Alison leaves with Mick. Carl pleads. Door slams.
• Scene 2 (Written Second): The confrontation. Alison announces she’s leaving. Carl discovers the affair. Accusations fly.
• Scene 3 (Written Third): Alison’s internal conflict. She’s fallen for Mick but hasn’t told Carl yet. The moment of decision.
• Scene 4 (Written Fourth): Alison’s first kiss with Mick after a particularly intense training session…

And so on, until you reach the story’s chronological beginning — perhaps Carl and Alison’s first date, now tinged with tragic irony because you know exactly how it ends.

Photo by Ryan Snaadt on Unsplash

Why This Works

Writing backwards forces you to justify every moment. When you know Alison leaves Carl for Mick, you must work backwards to create believable motivations.

Why would she do this?

What cracks existed in their relationship from the very start?

How did Mick become attractive enough for her to risk everything?

This process eliminates the meandering that plagues many pantser-written stories. Every scene must serve the inevitable conclusion. There’s no room for tangents that don’t contribute to the outcome you’ve already established.

Discovery Through Reverse Engineering

Pantsers live and breathe for the spontaneity of composition. We struggle with the formal structure.

The Memento Method gives us structure without sacrificing spontaneity. Working backwards, we discover why Alison would leave Carl by exploring their relationship’s fault lines. We uncover Mick’s appeal by examining what Carl lacks. We find the story’s real themes by seeing what the ending demands.

The process feels like detective work. Why did Alison choose this particular Tuesday to leave? What happened the night before? What about the week before that?

Each question leads to character discoveries that feel organic because we’re following the natural thread of cause and effect — just in reverse.

The beauty of this method is its invisibility to readers.

Once you’ve written your story backwards, you simply position the scenes in chronological order for publication. Readers experience a traditionally structured narrative, unaware that you constructed it in reverse.

The Freedom of Working Backwards

The technique eliminates the pantser’s greatest enemy: the soggy, sagging middle.

When you work backwards, there is no middle — only a series of discoveries that build toward your starting point.

Each scene must justify what came after (chronologically speaking), creating natural narrative momentum.

Most pantsers hit the Wall at the halfway or three-quarter mark. They’ve created compelling characters and situations, but have accumulated so much narrative crud along the way that it’s impossible to resolve them satisfyingly.

The reverse method flips this dynamic entirely.

As we discover who these characters really are through reverse exploration, we might realize Alison wouldn’t actually leave, or that Mick isn’t the type to steal someone’s girlfriend, or that Carl has a secret that changes everything.

The beauty is that you can change your ending as you go. You’re not locked into rigid planning. Instead, you’re discovering the story through controlled excavation.

The Memento Effect

The result is a different writing process where we’re still basically pantsing it, but where every word serves the ending. Inevitability replaces uncertainty. The journey backwards creates a tight journey forward.

Your readers will never know you wrote it backwards. But they’ll feel the difference in every perfectly placed detail, every inevitable turn, every moment that seems to exist for exactly the right reason.

Because it does.