How to outline a novel, scene by scene

What an outline is for

An outline is the cheapest draft of your novel you will ever write. In a week you can see the whole shape of the book, find the sagging middle before you have spent three months inside it, and move a scene from chapter twenty to chapter four by moving one line. It is not a contract. The best outlines get argued with, and lose.

Outlining scene by scene, rather than chapter by chapter, matters because the scene is where a story actually happens. A chapter is a container. A scene is a unit of change: someone wants something, meets resistance, and leaves the scene in a different place from where they entered it. If you can say what changes in every scene, you have a book that moves. If you can't, you have found the problem while it is still cheap to fix.

1. Start with the premise, the want and the need

Before structure, you need to know what the book is about in a form short enough to say out loud. A logline does that. A useful pattern is: when something happens, a specific person must do something difficult, or else something they care about is lost. Specific matters. "A woman" gives you nothing to outline. "A translator who has never chosen a book" gives you scenes.

Then separate two things writers often blur. The want is what your protagonist is visibly chasing: the job, the treasure, the divorce, the killer. The need is what they must learn, accept or give up, and it usually runs against the want. K.M. Weiland frames this as the lie the character believes at the start of the book. It is a good question to ask: what does she believe on page one that the story will prove wrong?

Write down, in a line each:

• What does the protagonist want, and what would getting it look like?
• What do they need, and why are they resisting it?
• What do they stand to lose: a person, a place, a version of themselves?
• What question does the book keep asking? That is your theme, and it is easier to outline as a question than as an answer.

2. Decide how much of the ending you need

Some novelists cannot start until they know the last scene. Others, often called pantsers or discovery writers, find the story by drafting it, and Stephen King has argued in On Writing for starting from a situation and seeing what the characters do. Both are real ways to write good books. The question is not which camp you belong to, but how much of the destination you need in order to keep driving.

E.L. Doctorow put the middle position well: writing a novel is like driving a car at night. "You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way." For most writers that means knowing three things before drafting:

• The final choice. Not the plot of the climax, but the decision your protagonist will face there.
• The final image. A picture of the world after the story, ideally one that answers the opening.
• Which way the need resolves. Does she learn it, refuse it, or learn it too late?

If even that feels like too much, write a draft first and outline afterwards. A reverse outline, a scene card for each scene you have already written, is the fastest way to see a discovery draft whole. Everything below works the same way in reverse.

3. Build the spine

The spine is the handful of turns that hold the book up. Every structure system names them differently, but most agree on something like this, with rough positions in the book:

1. Opening state. What normal looks like, and what is wrong with it.
2. Inciting incident (somewhere in the first tenth). The event that disturbs normal and starts the want.
3. End of act one (around a quarter). The protagonist commits and can't easily go back.
4. Midpoint (around halfway). A reversal or revelation that changes what the want means.
5. Crisis (around three quarters). Everything the protagonist has tried has failed; the cost of the lie comes due.
6. Climax. The choice only this character could make, made under the most pressure.
7. Resolution. The new normal, and the final image.

The percentages are guides for proportion, not page numbers. A slow literary novel may take a third of its length to commit; a thriller may commit in chapter two. What matters is that the turns exist and that each one changes the direction of the book, not just its intensity.

You don't need a system to find them, but the well-known ones give you a vocabulary and a checklist. They describe the same animal from different sides.

Pick the one whose words help you think, and don't let it overrule the book. If your novel genuinely has no midpoint reversal, that is a choice you can make; just make sure something else is holding up the middle.

4. Break the spine into chapters, and chapters into scenes

Once you have the turns, decide roughly where each one falls by chapter, then fill the gaps. Think of a chapter as a short sequence of scenes with one job: introduce the antagonist, close an escape route, make the protagonist pay for a mistake. Write that job at the top of the chapter. If two chapters have the same job, merge them.

Inside the chapter, scenes tend to alternate between action and reaction. Dwight Swain called these scene and sequel: in a scene, a character pursues a goal, meets conflict and ends in some kind of disaster; in the sequel, they react, face a dilemma and make a decision, which becomes the goal of the next scene. You don't need to follow this strictly, but it explains why a run of all-action scenes feels breathless and a run of all-reaction scenes feels stuck.

End most chapters on a question rather than an answer. The reader should close a chapter knowing more than they did and wanting to know something new.

5. Write a card for every scene

This is the heart of a scene-by-scene outline. Each card is short, a paragraph at most, and answers the same questions:

• POV. Whose eyes and head we are in. Usually one per scene.
• Goal. What that character wants in this scene, concretely and now. "Get the contract signed by phone", not "find herself".
• Conflict. Who or what is in the way. It is most often another person with a goal of their own.
• Turn, or outcome. How the scene ends for the goal: yes, no, yes but, or no and. "Yes but" and "no and" keep a book moving; too many plain yeses let the air out.
• What changes. The value that shifts, from what to what: trust to suspicion, safe to exposed, ignorant to knowing. Robert McKee's Story makes this the test of a scene, and it is the best single test we know.
• Setting. Where and when, plus one sensory anchor you can start the scene from.
• Length. A rough word count. Not a target, a budget, so you notice when a minor scene is eating a chapter.

Two optional fields earn their place on most cards: what the scene plants or pays off (a clue, an object, a line that matters later), and a blank line for notes after drafting.

The "what changes" line is the filter. If you can't fill it in, the scene is probably information the reader needs but no event, and it can be folded into a neighbouring scene or cut. Story Grid's version of the same idea is that every scene needs an inciting incident, a complication that turns it, a crisis, a climax and a resolution; at card length, "goal, conflict, turn, change" is enough to catch most dead scenes.

6. Decide how detailed to go

There are three useful levels of detail, and most good outlines use all three at once:

• Turns only. One line per major turn. Right for the far end of the book, and for later books in a series.
• A line per scene. A beat sheet. Right for the next act.
• A full card per scene. Right for the next three to five chapters, the ones you will draft soon.

This is Doctorow's headlights again. Detail near, outline far. Plans for chapter twenty-two written before chapter one is drafted are mostly guesses, and the more detail you invest in a guess, the harder it is to let it go when the draft tells you something better.

Heavy plotters can card the whole book, and some genres reward it: mysteries with planted clues, thrillers with braided timelines, anything with more than two points of view. Even then, treat the far cards as pencil.

7. Revise the outline while you draft

An outline that never changes is either a very lucky plan or a draft that has stopped listening. A simple habit keeps the two in step:

• After each chapter, update its cards to match what you wrote, not what you planned. That is a reverse outline, one chapter at a time.
• Keep a drift log. One line each time the draft departs from the plan, and what that changes downstream.
• When a character refuses a scene, ask why before you force it. Often the outline asked them to do something the earlier draft made impossible.
• Re-check the spine at the midpoint and at the crisis, not every week. Re-outlining the whole book every Friday is a way of not writing it.
• Card a new scene before you add it, and ask it the same question: what changes?

A complete example: outlining The Faithful Copy

Most outlining guides stop at the method. Here is the method carried all the way through, on a novel we invented for this page: premise, cast, the ending, the spine, a card for every scene in act one, and the major turns for the rest. It is the level of outline we would want before starting a draft.

The premise

Cast and setting

The ending, decided first

For this book we know the destination. Hanna will translate Leonor's version and add an afterword under her own name that says exactly what she changed, what she knows and what she can't know. Leonor will give Duarte's letters to the national library instead of burning them. The final image: Leonor at her cleared dining table, reading Hanna's afterword aloud in English with a teacher's pencil, correcting it as she goes. It answers the opening, where Hanna silently fixes another writer's sentences and lets him take the credit.

Knowing the ending told us what the midpoint had to do: break Hanna's certainty about which version is the true one, so that the climax is a real choice and not a rescue.

The spine

Act one, scene by scene

Four chapters, fifteen scenes, about 23,000 words, a little over a quarter of the book. One point of view throughout, so the POV field is always Hanna and we show it on the first card only; in a book with several narrators, that line does more work.

The rest of the book, in turns

Past act one, we outline by turns and a line per chapter group. These will change once the draft gets there, and that is the point of keeping them light.

What the example shows

• Every card has a turn. No scene ends where it started, even the quiet ones (scenes 2 and 10).
• The protagonist acts. In nearly every scene Hanna wants something and does something about it. Things happen to her, but she makes the moves that matter.
• The set-ups are on the cards. Duarte dictating from his bed in scene 10 is what makes the climax possible. Writing "plants" on the card is how you remember to pay it off forty thousand words later.
• The midpoint changes the meaning of the want. Before it, "a faithful translation" means the original. After it, nobody knows what it means, which is what forces the need.
• Detail falls away with distance. Full cards for act one, a line per chapter group after that.

Free novel outline template

Here is the template we used, with every field from the example. Copy it into whatever you write in, or download it as a plain-text Markdown file that opens in any text editor, Word, Google Docs or Feldar. Copy the cast, chapter and scene blocks as many times as you need.

PREMISE
Working title:
Genre and target length:
Point of view:
Logline:
Want:
Need:
The lie they believe:
What they stand to lose:
The question the book keeps asking:

ENDING
The final choice:
The final image:
How it answers the opening:

CAST (one per main character)
Name, age, role:
Wants:
Hiding or refusing to see:
Helps or blocks the protagonist by:
Changed by the end:
One concrete detail:

PLACES (one per setting)
Place:
What happens here:
Sensory anchor:

SPINE
Opening state:
Inciting incident (first tenth):
End of act one (about a quarter):
First pinch:
Midpoint (about half):
Second pinch:
Crisis (about three quarters):
Climax:
Resolution and final image:

CHAPTER (one per chapter)
Number and title:
Rough length:
The chapter's job:
Scenes:
The question it leaves:

SCENE CARD (one per scene)
Number and title:
POV:
Setting (where, when, one sensory anchor):
Summary (one sentence):
Goal:
Conflict:
Turn (yes / no / yes but / no and):
What changes (from what to what):
Plants or pays off:
Rough length:
Notes after drafting:

If you are naming a large cast, the character name generator can suggest names that fit a period and place. To check how your drafted chapters compare with the lengths on your cards, paste them into the word counter.

Common outlining mistakes

• Outlining events instead of changes. "They have dinner" is an event. "At dinner she learns he sold the house" is a scene. Every card needs its "what changes" line.
• A middle made of obstacles. Twelve chapters of things getting harder in the same way is not a second act. The midpoint should change the direction of the book, not just raise the volume.
• A protagonist who only reacts. If most of your cards begin with something happening to her, give her a goal in each scene and let her make the move that goes wrong.
• Leaving the opposition off the outline. Antagonists have plans. Write a short spine for theirs, even if it never appears on the page, and their scenes will start pushing back.
• Planning the far end in detail. Precise cards for chapter thirty, written before chapter one, are guesses you will be reluctant to abandon.
• Treating the outline as finished. An outline that has not changed after five drafted chapters is probably being obeyed rather than used.
• Outlining instead of writing. If you have rebuilt the spine for the third time this month, start drafting the first chapter you are sure of. The draft will answer questions the outline can't.
• Every scene the same size. If every card says about 2,000 words, look again. Some moments deserve a page and some deserve a chapter.

How long should a novel outline be?

As long as it needs to be for you to start drafting with confidence, and no longer. Some rough ranges, worked out from the levels of detail above rather than from any rule:

• A spine fits on one page: six to ten turns, a line or two each.
• A line per scene for a book of fifty to eighty scenes comes to a few pages, perhaps 1,500 to 4,000 words.
• A full card per scene, at 80 to 200 words a card, comes to somewhere between 5,000 and 15,000 words for the whole book. The act-one cards above come to about 1,700 words for fifteen scenes.

Very detailed outlines, the kind that run to tens of thousands of words with dialogue sketched in, are closer to a zero draft. That can work, especially for tightly plotted mysteries, but notice when the outline has started to cost you the pleasure of finding things out in the draft.

Outlining a series

A series needs two spines: one for the whole series and one for each book. The series spine works like a book spine scaled up. Book one carries the inciting incident, a middle book carries the reversal, and the last book carries the climax. But each book still needs its own complete shape, with its own climax and a resolution that satisfies a reader who never picks up the sequel.

• Outline book one fully, later books in turns only. What you discover drafting book one will change book three.
• Plant, but don't depend. Set things up in book one that can pay off later, but don't let book one's ending need book two to make sense.
• Keep one source of truth for the cast and world. Ages, eye colours, who knows what and when. A series breaks on continuity long before it breaks on plot.
• Track arcs across books. A character can change a little in each book or a lot in one. Decide which before the reader notices that nobody has changed at all.

Outlining a novel in Feldar

In Feldar, each page of your book, usually one chapter, has an Outline of scenes beside it. You can type your scene cards in yourself, or describe the next beats, choose how many scenes you want, and Generate scenes proposes a title and short description for each. Nothing is fixed: rewrite them, delete the ones that don't belong, add your own. The plan stays next to the page while you write, so updating it after a chapter takes a minute. How scene planning works.

Your cast and places go on the Canvas, a board of cards for characters, locations, items, factions, plot beats and notes, joined by labelled links such as Opposes or Causes. For the example above, that is Hanna, Leonor, Graça and Tomás, the flat in Lapa and the back room, with Tomás opposing Leonor. When Feldar suggests scenes or text, it draws on those cards. For the rest of the app, see novel writing software.