How to outline a novel: beat sheet, scene cards, plot grid

An outline is a short version of your novel that you can change in an afternoon. That is the case for outlining: you find out that the middle sags, or that a subplot disappears for a hundred pages, while the fix is still one line long.

There are three common ways to outline a novel, and each answers a different question. This post works all three for Romeo and Juliet, so you can see what each one shows.

A beat sheet: the turning points in order

A beat sheet is a list of the moments where the story turns. It answers one question: does this story have a shape.

Three well-known sheets do the same job at different levels of detail:

• Three-act structure. Setup, confrontation, resolution. Two turning points mark the borders between acts, and a midpoint changes the direction of the middle.
• Save the Cat. Fifteen beats, from an opening image to a final image that answers it. It is the finest-grained of the three, so it tells you most about the long middle.
• The Hero's Journey. Twelve stages. Someone leaves an ordinary world, crosses into an unfamiliar one, faces an ordeal there, and comes home changed. It fits quests and coming-of-age stories best.

Here is Romeo and Juliet as a three-act beat list:

1. Opening. The two houses brawl in the street. The Prince promises death to whoever fights next.
2. Inciting incident. Romeo goes uninvited to the Capulet feast and meets Juliet.
3. First turning point. Friar Laurence marries them in secret.
4. Midpoint. Tybalt kills Mercutio. Romeo kills Tybalt and is banished.
5. Second turning point. Juliet is ordered to marry Paris. She takes the Friar's potion to seem dead.
6. Climax. The Friar's letter never reaches Romeo. He believes she is dead, and they both die in the tomb.
7. Resolution. The houses make peace over the bodies.

Seven lines, and you can already test the story: each beat follows from the one before, and the ending pays off the opening.

A beat sheet suits you if you are starting from a premise, or if you write by discovery and only want a few fixed points to steer toward. Its limit is that it says nothing about the scenes between the beats.

Scene cards: one card for each scene

A scene card holds a title and one line saying what changes in the scene. Traditionally it is an index card, so you can lay the book out on a table and move things.

A handful of cards from the middle of the play:

1. Tybalt's death. Romeo kills Tybalt in the street and is banished.
2. The Nurse's news. Juliet learns her husband has killed her cousin, and chooses her husband.
3. Capulet sets the wedding. Capulet promises Juliet to Paris, on Thursday.
4. Dawn parting. Romeo leaves for Mantua. Neither knows it is the last time they will speak.
5. The refusal. Juliet refuses Paris. Her father threatens to disown her.
6. The potion. The Friar offers a drug that fakes death. Only he and Juliet know.

Now shuffle. In the play, card 3 comes before card 4, so the audience watches the lovers part already knowing a wedding has been arranged behind them. Swap the two and the parting is only sad. Order is a decision, and cards make it cheap to try another one.

Two more tests work on cards. Check that you can join any two neighbors with "so" or "but", not "and then". And take a card away: if nothing after it breaks, the scene may not be needed.

Cards suit you if you think in scenes, or if you have a pile of scenes and no order for them. Their limit is that they show sequence, not strands: a row of cards will not tell you that a subplot has been missing for a long stretch.

A plot grid: scenes against threads

A plot grid is a table. Scenes run down the side in reading order. Plot threads run across the top. Each cell says what happens to that thread in that scene, and most cells stay empty.

Read across a row to see what a scene is doing: the feast moves two threads at once. Read down a column to see where a thread goes quiet. Paris's suit is empty for four scenes in a row, and when he returns the reader has to remember who he is. In your own book that gap is a prompt: give the thread a line in one of the empty scenes, or keep the silence on purpose.

A grid suits you if your book has several points of view, clues to place, or subplots that must land together at the end. It needs scenes to exist first, so it usually comes after cards. A timeline does a related job for dates: the play runs over five days, and a grid will not tell you whether those days add up.

How much outline is enough

Enough that you know the ending and what each of the next few scenes changes. In practice that is a beat sheet plus one line for each scene.

• Too little: you cannot say how the book ends, or you sit down to write and do not know what today's scene is for.
• Enough: every card names a change, and you can explain why each scene follows the last.
• Too much: the outline contains dialogue and description. At that point you are drafting in the wrong file. Go and write the scene.

If you write by discovery, outline afterward: make a card for every scene in the first draft and fill in a grid. The tools that plan a book also diagnose one.

Revising the outline when the draft departs from it

It will depart. A character refuses the choice you planned, or a better idea arrives in chapter nine. When it happens:

1. Finish the scene first. Don't stop in the middle of it.
2. Decide which is right, the plan or the page. You know more now than when you planned.
3. Rewrite the outline from that point forward. Change the cards that no longer hold and delete the ones that cannot happen.
4. Reread the grid columns. A changed scene often orphans a thread. If Juliet never took the potion, the letter to Mantua would have nothing to carry.
5. List what the change breaks earlier in the book. Don't fix it now. Keep the list for the revision. The post on finding plot holes covers that pass.

An outline that still describes the book you planned months ago is no use. Keep it true to the draft and it stays worth opening.

How to do each in Plotra

In Plotra the outline and the manuscript are the same notes. A scene's title, status and one-line synopsis appear in every view, so changing a card changes the outline and the grid too. All of this is on the Free plan; see pricing.

Beat sheets you can start from

In the binder, open the New… menu and choose Beat sheet…. Pick Save the Cat, Hero's Journey or Three-act structure. Add builds a folder with a chapter for each act and a scene for each beat, and each scene's synopsis says what the beat does. They are ordinary notes: rename them, reorder them, delete the ones you don't need. See Starting from a structure.

The Outline and the Corkboard

The Outline is a table with a row for every note in the project. Edit the title, status and synopsis in place, filter by kind, status or tag, and sort by a column. Filters reset when you close the tab.

The Corkboard shows one folder or chapter as index cards. Double-click a card to write its synopsis. Drag a card onto another to reorder, and the binder order changes with it, for everyone in the project. A card moves within its own folder only: to move a scene to another chapter, drag it in the binder.

The Plot grid

Open the Plot grid and click Thread to add a column. Click a cell and write what happens to that thread in that scene. The cell is tinted in the thread's color, so an empty run down a column is easy to see. Under a thread's three dots, Resolved in sets the scene where the thread ends. Be careful with Delete thread in the same menu: it removes the thread and every cell in its column at once, without asking.

Split panes and writing goals

To write with the plan in view, split the screen. ⌘⌥\ moves the active tab into a new pane on the right, so the pane needs at least two tabs open. Put the Corkboard on one side and the scene on the other, and save the arrangement as a named layout. See Tabs and panes.

Once the outline tells you how many chapters there are, give each one a size. A chapter has a Target words property, and the Stats view lists every note that has a target beside its current count. You can also set a daily goal, a session goal and a target for the whole project. In a shared project, Today counts everyone's words together. See Writing goals.

What to do next

Write seven beats for your book today, from the opening to the ending. If you cannot fill one, you have found the first thing to solve. Then write a card for each scene between the first two beats, and start drafting.