Guides

How to Outline a Novel: Methods, a Template, and How to Choose

An outline is the list of what happens in a novel, in order, written before the draft or rebuilt after it. An outline and a structure are different things: a plan lists, a structure holds. Both get built from the same notes.

This guide describes four ways of building that list, each with its source, and gives you a chapter-by-chapter template you can fill tonight. Where working writers disagree, both sides are on the page.

Most of it holds for a memoir, a screenplay, a long essay or a serial as well.

What any outline has to answer

Whatever the method, an outline that can carry a draft answers the same questions. Who wants something, and who or what stands in the way. Robert McKee calls the event that upsets the character's life and sets the wanting in motion the inciting incident.

John Truby adds a condition on the obstacle: an adversary who wants the same thing as the protagonist. Two people who want different things simply pass each other on the road.

McKee's other idea is the gap: what the character expects to happen at each step, set against what actually happens. An outline that records only events leaves that space empty. The template below gives it a column.

Truby again, on endings: the character starts from a weakness they cannot see. The desire is visible and the need is hidden, and mistaking one for the other ruins last chapters.

So the final question is what is different at the end, and whether the character found out what they needed. A method is an order in which to answer those questions, plus a page count to answer them on.

Four methods, and what each one asks for first

The Snowflake Method

Randy Ingermanson's Snowflake Method runs ten steps, and the first is a one-sentence summary of the whole novel. He asks for fewer than fifteen words and no character names. Step ten is the first draft itself.

Between the two, each step expands the one before it. The sentence becomes a paragraph, the paragraph a page, the page four pages, and those become a list of scenes, one line each. Character sheets get steps of their own along the way.

He writes that going back to revise earlier steps as later ones teach you something is inevitable, and good. He also writes that the best method is the one that works for you.

Source: advancedfictionwriting.com, read 17 September 2026.

Three acts

Situation, complication, resolution. The three-act shape is older than any manual, and it gets noticed after the fact as often as it gets planned. As a method, it asks for three sentences first, then the events that carry each act into the next.

Its cost is low and so is its resolution: three sentences leave a lot of middle unaccounted for. Ingermanson maps his own second step onto the three acts, so the two methods stack without friction.

The seven-point structure

Dan Wells walks through the seven-point structure, a system he uses, on the podcast Writing Excuses, season 7, episode 41 (October 2012). He says he took it from a role-playing book, and that it sees regular use in screenwriting.

The seven points, in order: hook, first plot turn, first pinch, midpoint, second pinch, second plot turn, resolution. The two pinches put pressure on the character; the midpoint is where reaction turns into action.

The method asks for the resolution first, then the hook as its opposite: the character's starting state, as far from the ending as the story allows.

The five points between are worked out last, to move the character believably from one to the other. Once they exist, each one becomes a scene or a chapter to write toward.

Source: writingexcuses.com, read 17 September 2026.

The beat sheet

A beat sheet is a list of a book's major turns, named and placed at roughly the positions where they tend to land. Jessica Brody adapted the screenwriting version for novelists in Save the Cat! Writes a Novel (Ten Speed Press, 2018).

It asks for the turns first, with a position for each. It also runs in the other direction, as a check on a finished draft for the turns it is missing.

Source: the publisher's page, read 17 September 2026.

Two more, briefly. Christopher Vogler's hero's journey, after Joseph Campbell, is a sequence of stages: the call, the refusal, the threshold, the ordeal, the return. K.M. Weiland's Outlining Your Novel: Map Your Way to Success (PenForASword, 2011) is a whole book on the question.

How to choose, without anyone choosing for you

Read the second column below against your notes. The method whose first ask you can already answer is the one you can start tonight. The others need a week of thinking before the first page, and a week is a normal cost.

The real split is older than the methods. Some writers build everything before the first sentence; others write to find out what they think. Most do both, at different scales, and change from one book to the next.

The amount of outline is a setting per project, and it can be changed mid-draft. Two facts about you sort most cases.

• Whether you think in people or in events: the Snowflake alternates character sheets with plot steps, while the seven points and the beat sheet are event-first.
• Whether you can name the ending: the seven points ask for it first, the Snowflake at step two, as one sentence of the paragraph. The beat sheet gives it a position, to be found later; the chapter table fills in as you go.

Where the phone notes go

Phone notes typed at odd hours are outline material that arrived out of order, including the one that says only "the aunt knows". Pull them into one document, each with its date, before choosing a method. They show what the book already wants.

Then sort them by the question they answer: who wants what, what tips it over, what goes wrong, what is different at the end. Anything that answers nothing yet goes in the template's last row, marked not placed.

The scattering is common, and nobody chose it. The plan in a spreadsheet, the notes in a document, the text somewhere else: each piece was added to solve one problem on the day it came up.

One document for the outline is the first thing any method gives you, and a note that never gets placed stays where you will see it again.

The chapter-by-chapter template

A chapter row that can hold a draft records what changes, and not only what happens. A scene, in McKee's definition, is the unit where a value shifts for someone. So the column that matters most has a start and an end.

The example row is chapter 34 of Pride and Prejudice. A separate guide reads that novel's turns against the five moments of a writing day.

Fill the columns you can, and no more. A row with only a working title is a chapter you know exists. A row with a start and an end is a chapter you can draft tomorrow.

"Between two turns" is a legitimate answer in the fifth column. A chapter can exist to move people across a country. The row simply records that it turns nothing, so two such rows in a row show up at a glance.

Word targets belong to a first draft, where the count orders the work. In revision the count often goes down, and that column stops meaning progress.

Keeping the outline alive through November

Somewhere in the second third of a draft, the text gets too long to hold in your head, and you reach for the outline. It earns its keep there, more than on the first day, and so does having one document rather than four.

A drafted chapter that no longer matches its row means the row is out of date. The rows below the changed one are where to look for what the change broke.

Ingermanson writes that he stops midway through a first draft to fix the broken parts of his design documents. By the end, he expects to laugh at the originals.

Facts the outline establishes as you go, names, ages, dates, who knows what by which chapter, belong in a story bible kept next to the outline. The outline stays a list of what happens; the bible keeps that list from contradicting itself.

The row for chapter one needs a working title and whose eyes it belongs to. That much can be written tonight, on the phone, in the document where the other notes now live.