How to Outline a Novel, and What to Do When the Outline Dies
To outline a novel, work out how much you need to know before you start, then use the lightest method that gives you that much: a paragraph and an ending, three acts, a Save the Cat beat sheet or a full snowflake. Expect the book to wander off the plan somewhere in the middle. Then you repair the plan, which is much cheaper than abandoning it.
Find Out Which Way You Get Stuck
Novelists divide themselves into plotters, who plan, and pantsers, who fly by the seat of their pants. George R.R. Martin’s version is architects and gardeners: the architect knows where the closets will go before driving the first nail, while the gardener digs a hole, drops in a seed, waters it “with their blood” and sees what comes up. He counts himself much more a gardener.
The extremes are real, and both have produced good books. Joseph Heller’s handwritten grid for Catch-22 sets the events out in chronological order, as the novel pointedly doesn’t. J.K. Rowling’s table for Order of the Phoenix gives each chapter a row and each subplot a column. At the far end, Georges Simenon told the Paris Review that he put on his envelope “only the names of the characters, their ages, their families”, and knew nothing of the events to come. “Otherwise it would not be interesting to me.”
So skip the question of what you are and ask what stops you. If you stall because you can’t see the next scene, you need more plan. If you stall because you can see it perfectly and the thought of typing it out makes you want to clean the oven, you need less. Between the two sits what some writers call a tentpole outline: four or five scenes you’re sure of, holding up a lot of loose canvas.
One Story, Three Outlines
The methods are easier to compare on a single story, so here’s one, invented for this page.
Dilys Pugh drives a school bus in Powys. When a fifteen-year-old called Carys doesn’t come home, Dilys tells the police the girl got off at her usual stop. She didn’t. She got off at the lane to the Pugh farm, with Dilys’s son.
Three Acts
Syd Field’s Screenplay (1979) popularised setup, confrontation and resolution for film, and novelists borrowed them. You write a paragraph for each.
- Act one, about a quarter of the book. Dilys lies. A man from the village is arrested partly on her statement, and she can no longer take it back without saying why she told it.
- Act two, about half. She investigates her own son while pretending not to. Halfway through, she finds Carys’s phone in his van, and she’s no longer protecting an innocent boy. It ends with the arrested man’s daughter climbing aboard her bus.
- Act three, the last quarter. Dilys has to choose between her son and that child’s father, and the choice costs her both.
This fits on a napkin, which is its strength. Its weakness is that half the book is covered by one word, “confrontation”, and that’s the half where novels go wrong. If you use three acts, give the middle its own turn, as above.
Save the Cat
Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat (2005) broke screenplays into 15 beats, and Jessica Brody adapted them for fiction in Save the Cat Writes a Novel (2018). The beats are given as rough percentages of the book. Here are the five that hold the rest up, placed on an 80,000-word novel.
| Beat | Rough position | At word | For Dilys |
|---|---|---|---|
| Catalyst | 10% | 8,000 | Carys doesn’t come home |
| Break into Two | 20% | 16,000 | The arrest: her lie now has a victim |
| Midpoint | 50% | 40,000 | The phone in the van |
| All Is Lost | 75% | 60,000 | Her son finds out she knows, and leaves |
| Break into Three | 80% | 64,000 | She goes to see the arrested man’s daughter |
A beat sheet gives you a question to ask at any point in the book, and that makes it very good at showing what’s missing. It also has a house style. In genres whose readers want those turns on schedule, that’s a service. In a quieter book, you can end up with a very well-behaved novel nobody needed. The percentages describe an average, so a Midpoint at 43% is nothing to worry about.
The Snowflake Method
Randy Ingermanson’s snowflake grows a book outwards in ten steps. You begin with one sentence:
A school-bus driver lies to the police to protect her son, and has to live with who pays for it.
That sentence becomes a paragraph of setup, three disasters and an ending. Then come a page on each main character, a page of plot, four pages of plot, full character charts, and finally a spreadsheet of scenes. Ingermanson’s own estimate is about 100 hours of design documents before the draft. The method suits people who want to solve the book first, and it’s well worth trying once if your drafts keep collapsing. The risk is that by the end you’ve spent your curiosity. After 100 hours with Dilys, you may know exactly what she does and have very little wish to watch.
How Much to Write per Scene
Whatever the method, you’ll eventually want a scene list. A line or two is enough: who wants what, what stops them, what has changed by the end.
Ch. 9. Dilys wants to know where her son Ieuan was on the Thursday. He asks why she told the police the wrong stop. She now knows he’s read her statement.
Once you’re writing dialogue here, stop, because you’ve started drafting in the wrong file, and the good lines won’t survive being copied across. A grid with plotlines as rows and chapters as columns will also show you what a list hides, such as the police vanishing for nine chapters. Index cards on a table do all of this for very little money. Plottr is a dedicated planner, and in Shiro’s Board the cards are the scenes themselves, with these structures and a plot grid included.
When the Outline Dies
It usually goes like this. You write chapter 14 as planned and it lies there. Or Dilys, who’s due at the police station in chapter 20, goes to see Carys’s mother instead, and however you write it she won’t turn the van round. You now own a detailed plan of a book you aren’t writing.
First find out what killed it, because the three usual causes want different treatment.
A character refused. Believe the character. You know her better now than on the day you made the plan, and a scene you have to force will read as forced.
You got bored. You know too much, and the surprise has gone, as Simenon warned. Take out the next planned scene and write something you hadn’t intended. It’s often enough to bring the rest back to life.
A cause no longer holds. The plot needs something to be true that, now it’s on the page, isn’t. Dilys can’t find the phone in the van if Ieuan sold the van in chapter 6. Decide now how you’ll fix it, make a note, and carry on as though you had.
Then repair the plan, in this order.
- Keep the corpse. Save a dated copy of the old outline. You’ll want bits of it, and throwing away a month’s work is harder than filing it.
- Outline what exists. One line for each scene as you wrote it, not as you planned it. This reverse outline takes about an hour and is often a surprise.
- Write down what must be true by the end. Three or four plain sentences. Dilys knows what her son did. Carys’s mother knows Dilys lied. The arrested man is free. Any route that gets there will do.
- Plan five scenes and no more. This is a rolling outline. E.L. Doctorow compared writing a novel to driving at night: you can only see as far as the headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
- Do it again when you run out.
Gardeners go through the same steps at a different time. Their reverse outline comes at the end of the first draft, and it’s the same document, only it cost them 80,000 words instead of a month of planning. Those words often turn out to be worth it.
The Questions People Ask
Do I need an outline to write a novel?
No. Plenty of novelists write without one and work out the structure in revision. If you stall because you don’t know what comes next, a short outline will help. If knowing what comes next bores you, it won’t.
Which outlining method should a beginner use?
Three acts, written as one paragraph each. It takes an evening, shows you whether you have a middle, and doesn’t commit you to anything. Move to a beat sheet if you want more scaffolding.
How detailed should a novel outline be?
One or two lines a scene is usually enough: who wants what, what stops them, what has changed by the end. Once you’re writing dialogue in the outline, you’ve started drafting in the wrong file.
Can I outline after writing the first draft?
Yes, and it’s one of the best uses of an outline. List every scene as written, in a line each, and the holes in the structure show up. This is called a reverse outline.
Last revised November 2026.