Guides

The fifteen beats of the best-known beat sheet, by page for a screenplay and by percentage for a novel, worked out for 50,000 words, with a blank table to copy and the words of the people who wrote the lists. No sign-up.

What six published writers say about drafts they doubted or disliked while still writing them, from a Pulitzer winner's journal to a novelist's call to his agent, and what each did next. Each with its source. No sign-up.

What writers and editors check in a novel idea, how big an idea a novel needs, and what writing a little of it shows. No sign-up.

An outline is the list of what happens in a novel, in order. Four ways to build it, each with its source, a chapter-by-chapter template, and how to choose.

How to turn a finished first draft into a second: how long to let it rest, how to read it, what to fix first, what to keep, when it is done, and a checklist. No sign-up.

Why the opening keeps pulling writers back, what a first draft is for, and the ways out authors describe, side by side. No sign-up.

Six guides, from seven steps to fourteen, give the same order: an idea, the people in it and what stands in their way, a plan as long or short as you like, a first draft written through to the end, then revision. What each step leaves in your hands, and where a month of novel writing falls in that order. No sign-up.

Short answer: a synopsis for a novel tells the whole story, from the first chapter to the last, ending included. It is written in the third person and the present tense, whatever…

What turns an antagonist from an obstacle into a character: a goal, a motive, the hero's own prize, and the scenes that show it. No sign-up.

Novelists who drafted in 15- and 20-minute sessions, why short sessions stall for some writers, and five habits other writers name, each with its source. No sign-up.

Where the word counts put 50,000 words, between the longest novella and the shortest novel, what a month of writing at that length holds, and five questions to ask a story of that size. No sign-up.

A "local file" is just a file that sits on the machine in front of you, the same category of object as a photo or a spreadsheet, except this one happens to hold a novel. That…

Markdown, DOCX, EPUB and plain text each do a different job for a manuscript: which one an editor or an e-reader expects, and what is lost between them.

A manuscript is the text in the shape someone else expects to receive it: an agent, an editor, a typesetter, formatted to whatever convention that reader works in. A working file…

An outline lists the events of a novel in order; structure is the shape they make together. Why the two get confused, shown on Jane Eyre.

These three sit on the same shelf and do entirely different jobs. Revision means re-making choices: a subplot gets cut, a character's motive changes, a whole section moves from…

A sequence is a group of scenes that all move the same value in the same direction, the way a chapter might follow one goal through several attempts before it either succeeds or…

Knowing your ending and drafting it first are two different choices. What authors say about each, and four questions for your own draft. No sign-up.

Standard manuscript format in one table: one-inch margins, 12-point type, double spacing, half-inch indents, a header with surname, title and page number, a rounded word count on the first page. Who wrote the rules, which have changed, and how to check a .docx file against them. No sign-up.

Freytag's five parts, the three acts and their plot points, the hero's journey and the beat sheet: who wrote each one, for what form, and one question to ask a draft with each. No sign-up.

Moving a hundred thousand words rewards a short list of questions asked before the move, not after — the same care a photo library asks for: Apple's transfer to Google Photos…

Ask three people what "the cloud" means and you'll get three shrugs and one confident wrong answer. For most files, that vagueness costs nothing. For a manuscript, it's worth ten…

A beat is the smallest working part of a scene: one exchange of behavior, an action followed by a reaction, small enough that a single scene is usually made of several of them…

A beat sheet lists the major turns of a whole book and where they tend to land. Where it comes from, what it oversells, and how it reads on Frankenstein.

A draft is a written version of a text not yet in its final form. Why an outline is not a draft, and how Madame Bovary was drafted page by page.

A scene is the unit where a value changes for someone: Robert McKee's definition, why a setting does not make one, and a turn in Great Expectations.

A story bible is the reference document for what a novel has established and what its writer has settled off the page. It holds character names and ages, dates, geography, family…

Point of view is a question about access: who is perceiving the events of the story, and how much can that person see into anyone else's mind. A story told in the third person but…

Why first drafts come out rough, what published writers say about their own, where the famous line about first drafts comes from, and what to fix first. No sign-up.

For whoever books the room: four weeks of November, three timed session formats, printable sheets and a December session. No platform or account needed.

Writing a novel in a month usually means 50,000 words in 30 days, or 1,667 a day. What a six-day week, catch-up days and four weekly stages change.

For close to two decades, one nonprofit organization ran the best-known version of this: write fifty thousand words of a novel in November, together, on a shared clock, with a…

October has become its own small tradition among writers getting ready for November. Since at least 2020, writers preparing for NaNoWriMo have called it Preptober, and the name…

After November: a December for revision, a weekly short-fiction contest, July's summer camp and contest, and how one manuscript moves through the year.

Around the World in Eighty Days ends on an accounting trick: Phileas Fogg is convinced he has lost his own wager, right up until someone checks the calendar. Read against a…

Frankenstein opens with a stack of letters: Robert Walton, an Arctic explorer, writing home to his sister about a stranger he's just pulled from the ice. Everything else in the…

In Korea, some successful web novels get told again, most often as a webtoon first, then as a drama, an animation, a film or a game. The relay is real, and it is the exception…

Great Expectations reached its readers one weekly installment at a time, in the magazine All the Year Round, with a new chapter due whether or not Dickens felt the book was ready.…

Ask whether bestsellers are getting longer or shorter, and the answer depends on which years and which books you count: the two studies most often cited cover different periods…

"Reader, I married him." Jane Eyre's narrator says this near the end of the book, but she's been talking directly to her reader since early in it. Read against a five-moment grid…

Madame Bovary went to trial in 1857, prosecuted for offending public morals, not long after the novel finished its serial run. Read against a five-moment grid for a writing day…

Pride and Prejudice runs to 61 chapters and 121,748 words in the public text. This page lays them out as an outline: words per chapter, where each starts, how much is quoted…

Partway through Pride and Prejudice, a single letter from Darcy rewrites everything Elizabeth believed about him, and about Wickham, in one sitting. Read against a five-moment…

Somewhere between Chaucer and Chaucer's modern reader, the English sentence lost most of its length, in novels and in genres with no dialogue at all. In novels, one other thing…

The Picture of Dorian Gray ends with a portrait and a corpse trading places: the picture turns young again, and the man who stayed young for years is found aged and dead beside…

TikTok started recommending novels a few years ago, through what's become known as BookTok, and the backlist, the quiet shelf of older titles no publisher was actively pushing…

Wuthering Heights ends exactly where it started: back with Lockwood, the tenant who asked for this story in the first place. Read against a five-moment grid for a writing day…

The book is not in chapters but in five staves, like the verses of a carol. Marley's ghost comes first, then one stave for each of the three spirits, then the end.

Journals, diaries, letters, telegrams, newspaper cuttings: the book is 27 chapters and 161,467 words of papers, and opens on a note: “How these papers have been placed in sequence…

Walton writes letters; inside them, Victor tells his story; inside Victor's, the creature tells his. The counts on this page were made by Scrin for this page in October 2026, in…

The book has 38 chapters and five places under six names, places that Robert B. Martin (1966) reads as five acts. Marsh End and Moor House are two names for one house, said in…

The book has 47 chapters in two parts. Chapter 1 is Playing Pilgrims; chapters 6 to 9 are Beth Finds the Palace Beautiful, Amy's Valley of Humiliation, Jo Meets Apollyon and Meg…

Of 135 chapters, 30 name none of these 11: Ahab, Ishmael, Queequeg, Starbuck, Stubb, Flask, Tashtego, Daggoo, Fedallah, and the owners Peleg and Bildad; a chapter counts when none…

There are no chapters. The book is one continuous text of 64,055 words, one day in June, and London's clocks strike the hours through it. The words were counted by Scrin for this…

Darcy's letter is in chapter 35 of 61. The chapter is 3,003 words, counted from its heading to the next in the Project Gutenberg text, and runs from 51% to 54% of the book, a…

The first word of the book is a year, 1801, in Lockwood's diary. Chapter 4 then goes back to the summer when Heathcliff is brought to the house. The year is not printed in the…

A screenplay runs about one page per minute of screen time: about 120 pages for a film of about two hours. Where the rule comes from, and what moves it.

To write a screenplay, put scenes on the page in the standard layout and read published scripts when the format raises a question. Show the draft to a few readers before any…

The screenplay font is Courier, 12 point, 10 pitch: the Courier typeface that scripts in the studio format share. Set inside margins of at least one inch, the page keeps the…