Novel Outline Example

The novel in one line

Nell Kerrigan, the last harbor pilot in a declining port town, agrees to guide one unlisted ship into a berth, and spends the year that follows deciding how much of the truth to hand over.

It is a contemporary thriller, 85,000 words in 24 chapters, three acts with the second split at the midpoint. The cast is four people: Nell; her brother Robbie, who crews a fishing boat; Douglas Speirs, who runs the port authority; and Aisha Nkemdirim, a customs investigator who arrives in chapter five and does not leave.

A one-liner and four names are the whole setup a novel needs. Write yours and start the book tonight: open a new story.

Act one, chapters 1 to 6

Twenty-one thousand words, a quarter of the book. Act one makes the decision in chapter three feel inevitable and the consequence in chapter six feel earned. The unlisted ship, which is the premise, does not arrive until chapter four: the three chapters before it make the reader want Nell to keep her job.

Six rows like these are one sitting in the novel outline template, and each row is enough for DreamPress to draft a 3,500-word chapter from. Write row one into a chapter.

Act two, first half, chapters 7 to 12

Twenty thousand six hundred words. Nell is investigating and being investigated at once, and the act runs on her believing she can hold both. The rows get shorter through this stretch: the pressure is rising and the chapters tighten with it.

Chapter 11 only works because chapter 3 happened, and chapter 12 lands because of chapter 6. Holding that across forty thousand words is the hard part. DreamPress holds it in a story bible and a running memory, identical on the free plan and on Pro. See it hold your story.

Act two, second half, chapters 13 to 18

Twenty-two thousand words, the longest act, because the situation gets worse in four directions and none of them can be closed. Every row takes something away from her, and by chapter 18 the only thing she has left is a lie that worked.

Chapter 18 turns on a statement signed in chapter 5, thirteen chapters and 46,000 words earlier. Write both in DreamPress and the second still knows what the first said. Start the book that remembers.

Act three, chapters 19 to 24

Twenty thousand eight hundred words. Every chapter pays for a decision made earlier, in the order the decisions were made. The goals are smaller than in act one, deliberately: by the end she is not saving the port, she is getting one person out.

Twenty-four rows, 85,000 words, one grid. Add a cover at 3 credits and narration with the chapter, and this is a finished book rather than a plan. Take the 15 free credits.

What to notice

Six things are worth reading off the table rather than out of the prose.

• The midpoint lands where it should. Chapter 12 is the honest conversation with Robbie, at the halfway mark by chapter count and within a thousand words by length. Before it, Nell is managing a problem. After it, she is committed to a person.
• Word counts move with pressure, not with importance. The longest chapter is 21 and the shortest is 24. The disaster needs room and the ending does not, the opposite of what most first drafts do.
• Three chapters out of twenty-four are not Nell's. Chapter 9 is Aisha, chapters 15 and 22 are Robbie, and in all three Nell is lied to or lied for. A point-of-view change earns its place when it shows the reader something the lead cannot see.
• Two rows were rewritten during drafting. Chapter 10 was a conversation and became a grounding, because the act needed a physical consequence before the midpoint. Chapter 17 was "she gives Aisha the logbook", the draft refused it, the turn flipped to "she keeps it", and chapters 18 to 23 were re-planned in twenty minutes.
• One chapter was cut. There was a chapter 5A in which Nell visited her mother. It had a goal and a conflict and no turning point, which is what the empty cell said.
• Nobody gets two information turns in a row. Read the turning-point column alone and the chapters alternate between learning something and doing something. That alternation was added in one pass after the grid was filled, which is far easier than row by row.

Now build your own. The novel outline template gives you this grid with the word targets added up by act, and the beat sheet gives you the turns first. Both are free and neither asks for an account. Then put the grid into DreamPress and write it row by row: 15 credits a day with no card, 50 more for verifying your email, and Pro at $9.99 a month with 1,000 credits. Turn this grid into a draft.

A short-story outline example

The same four fields work at 4,000 words. Six rows, one sitting.

Six short rows, one evening, and 15 free credits a day to spend on them. Finish a story tonight.