How to Outline a Novel

Why outline at all

A first draft written without one stalls somewhere around 30,000 words, at the point where the opening situation has been fully explored and nothing has replaced it. The symptom is easy to recognize: the writing is still fine, and you no longer know what the next chapter is for.

Decide three things in advance and that does not happen: the ending, the act turns, and roughly what each chapter is for. That is the whole job of an outline and it takes one afternoon.

The outline is what lets you write chapter fourteen on a day when you do not feel like it, which is most days. A draft finished on ordinary days is worth more than a brilliant third of a draft. DreamPress makes the ordinary days cheap: give it the row, get the chapter, keep your voice, 1 to 3 credits against 15 free credits a day. Finish the draft instead of restarting it.

Step 5 in detail: the chapter row

The row has four fields and each one answers a different question.

Goal is what the point-of-view character is trying to achieve here. It must be concrete and it must be theirs. "Learn more about the ship" is not a goal. "Get the manifest out of the harbor office before Friday" is.

Conflict is what stands in the way. The most useful conflicts are people with reasons, not obstacles with none.

Turning point is what is different by the last line. A chapter without one is a scene that happened. It is one of three things: the character learns something that changes the plan, the character does something that cannot be undone, or someone else does.

Point of view and word target are the pacing fields, and they only make sense read down the column rather than across the row.

Here are two rows from the middle of a 24-chapter plan. The book is a contemporary thriller: Nell Kerrigan, a harbor pilot in a declining port town, guides one unlisted ship into a berth and spends the next year deciding how much of the truth to hand over.

Chapter 11 is an information turn and chapter 12 is a commitment turn. Two of the same kind in a row is the most common outlining fault, obvious in the table and invisible in the draft.

The complete plan, all twenty-four rows with the act breaks, is at a full novel outline example. A row that size is exactly what DreamPress needs to write the chapter: turn one row into 3,600 words.

Three ways to fill the rows

From the ending backwards. Write the last chapter's row first, then ask what has to be true one chapter earlier for it to happen. Keep going. This produces the tightest plots, so check afterwards that each chapter has its own reason to exist. It is the right method for crime, for anything with a reveal, and for any book whose last page has to land on a specific image.

From the midpoint outwards. Write the moment the plan fails, place it at about the halfway mark, then build in both directions. This is the fastest method when you know the situation but not the ending, and it protects the midpoint, the part of a novel most likely to sag. Leave the final four rows loose and choose between them late.

From the beat sheet down. Fill a beat sheet first, then assign chapters to beats. Some beats take three chapters and some take a paragraph, which is exactly the information you want before you start. Use it in any genre with strong reader expectations, because the beats carry those expectations for you; the beat sheet examples show three novels planned that way.

Any of the three gets you a grid by the end of the day. Write the first row tonight.

Using the outline while you draft

An outline that lives in a file you opened once is not doing anything. Three habits turn it into a working document.

Read the next row before you start, and nothing else. Reading the whole plan each session produces anxiety about chapter nineteen while you write chapter six. One row is the right amount of future to hold.

Mark each row done, with the real word count beside the target. After six or seven chapters you will know whether you write long or short, and you can correct the remaining targets instead of discovering a 130,000-word draft at the end. This is the most useful number the table gives you.

Write down what actually happened when it differs from the plan. Not as a note to yourself, but in the row, replacing what was there. A table that records the book you are writing is worth rereading; a table that records the book you intended to write is a decision you have already overruled.

DreamPress does the third habit for you. Every chapter you keep goes into the running memory and the story bible, so what actually happened is what the next chapter is written from. Draft the next row now.

Changing the outline while you write

The outline is a plan, not a contract. Expect to break it around chapter eight, when the characters become specific enough to have opinions.

The fix is to re-plan from where you are. Open the table, delete every row after the chapter you are on, and rewrite them from the new situation. It takes twenty minutes and it is the difference between a draft that changes direction and a draft that stops.

Do the same when a fact changes. If the brother turns out to have been on the boat, that is now true in every row that follows, and the place to fix it is the table, not your memory of the table. In DreamPress the table is also what the writing reads from: update the story bible once and every chapter after it carries the new fact, at chapter nine and at chapter thirty-nine. Re-plan and keep going.

Common mistakes

Outlining every scene. A chapter row is one line. A scene-level plan is a draft with the prose missing, and it is usually a way of avoiding writing the prose.

No turning point in a chapter. If the turning-point cell is empty, the chapter is a transition and it will read like one. Either give it a turn or fold it into its neighbor.

The same point of view forever. Look down the POV column. If it reads the same for eleven rows and then switches once, the switch will read as a mistake however well written it is.

An outline longer than the draft. Twenty-four rows of one line each is an outline. Twenty-four pages is a synopsis, and it will be out of date by chapter six.

A plan with no cost in it. Read down the turning-point column and ask what the character loses in each row. If the answer is nothing for six rows running, the middle of the book is a sequence of events rather than a story, and good prose will not fix that at the sentence level.

Every one of these is visible in a grid and invisible in a document. Fill the grid in the novel outline template: a row per chapter with the same four fields, grouped by act, adding up the word targets as you go, free and with no account.

From outline to chapter one

This is the part most outlining advice leaves you to do alone, and it is the part DreamPress is for.

Put the outline in. Write the row for chapter one into the story and DreamPress drafts it at the length you set, in your style, in the point of view you assigned. Keep it, edit it, then do chapter two. The story bible — DreamPress calls it World Information — holds the names, the rules and the relationships, and a running memory holds what has already happened. Both are identical on the free plan and on Pro. That is why chapter forty still knows what chapter two said.

Covers and character portraits are 3 credits each on every plan including Pro, generated into the chapter they belong to, and narration comes with the chapter. The price is 15 credits a day with no card, 50 more for verifying your email, and 20 a day once a streak reaches seven days. Pro is $9.99 a month or $71.99 a year with 1,000 credits.

You have the plan. Write chapter one free.