How to Outline a Novel in 6 Steps (+ Template and Complete Example)

To outline a novel, define the central premise, work out what your protagonist wants and what stands against them, choose a broad structure for the story, map the major turning points, break those turning points into chapters or scenes, and then test the whole thing for pacing, causality and character change. An outline can be six lines or sixty pages. Its purpose is to make the story workable before you draft it, not to predict every sentence.

There is no correct outlining method. A useful outline is one that gives you enough direction to know what to write next.

The 6 Steps at a Glance On How To Outline A Novel:

Step	Question being solved	What you end up with
1. Define the premise	What is this story fundamentally about?	A one-sentence premise
2. Choose the structure	How does the story broadly progress?	A beginning, middle and end framework
3. Develop the character arc	Who wants what, why, and how do they change?	A character trajectory
4. Build the plot	What causes each major event?	Major plot beats, causally linked
5. Outline chapters and scenes	How does this unfold on the page?	A draftable chapter or scene plan
6. Stress-test it	Does the story actually work?	A revised working outline

This guide covers fiction specifically. If you’re outlining a memoir, a business book or another kind of nonfiction, our guide to writing a book outline covers the broader process across book types.

What Is a Novel Outline?

A novel outline is a written plan of a story’s events, characters and structure, produced before or during drafting. It can range from a handful of major beats to a full scene-by-scene document.

Four terms get used interchangeably online and shouldn’t be. They describe different levels of detail:

Term	What it means
Story outline	The overall direction of the story
Plot outline	The major events and turning points
Chapter outline	What broadly happens in each chapter
Scene outline	The goal, conflict, event and consequence inside individual scenes

Most working outlines combine at least two of these. A common shape is a plot outline for the whole book plus a scene outline for the next three or four chapters, extended as drafting moves forward.

From Our Editorial Experience

Editorial note: the observations in this section come from Writers of the West’s work developing fiction with authors at different stages, from initial concepts through partial drafts to completed manuscripts.

In our experience, roughly seven in ten fiction clients approach us at an early development stage. About half primarily have an idea or a broad story summary. Another twenty percent or so have begun developing it: notes, character material, a few pages, early chapters, or AI-assisted work.

Most are not struggling to come up with an idea. They are struggling to turn that idea into a complete story. The middle of the book is the usual casualty, along with the question that stops nearly everyone: what actually happens in chapter eleven.

An outline answers that question before a draft makes it expensive.

How to Outline a Novel in 6 Steps

The example running through all six steps below is an original thriller invented for this guide. Following one story from premise to finished scene is more useful than seeing six unrelated novels analysed once each.

Step 1: Define the Core Premise

The premise is one sentence containing four things: a protagonist, a goal, an opposition and stakes. If any of the four is missing, the story usually has a problem you’d rather find now.

The example: A marine salvage diver raises a fishing boat that sank three years ago, finds evidence it was scuttled on purpose, and has to decide what to do when the trail leads back to the man who paid for his sister’s education.

That sentence gives us Daniel Reyes, a goal (establish what happened to the Marisol), an opposition (Ray Kessler, part-owner of the boat and the family’s benefactor) and stakes (Daniel’s salvage licence, his sister’s debt, and a widow’s claim that nobody has paid).

Note what the premise doesn’t contain. No setting description, no backstory, no theme statement. Those arrive later. At this stage the sentence only has to be clear enough to steer by.

Put this into your outline: Write one sentence naming your protagonist, their goal, the main obstacle, and what they lose if they fail. If you can’t do it in one sentence, the problem probably isn’t the wording yet. The story itself still needs clarification.

Step 2: Choose Your Story Structure

Story structure and outlining method are different things, and treating them as interchangeable causes a lot of confusion.

Structure is the architecture of the story: how it progresses from beginning to end. The Three-Act Structure is a structure. So is the Hero’s Journey. A method is a process for developing that structure. The Snowflake Method is a method. So is writing scene cards. You can use the Snowflake Method to build a three-act story, and the two are doing different jobs.

Three acts is the simplest structure to demonstrate, and it fits most fiction:

• Act I: the ordinary situation, the disruption, the decision that commits the protagonist
• Act II: escalating complications, a midpoint that changes what the story is about, and the consequences of that change
• Act III: the final confrontation and the resolution

Applied to the Marisol:

• Act I: Daniel is contracted to raise the wreck. He finds the seacock wired open, which means somebody sank it deliberately. He files a neutral report, says nothing, and then reports it anonymously.
• Act II: The investigation reopens. Kessler, not knowing who tipped off the county, hires Daniel to consult on the salvage evidence, which puts Daniel inside the cover-up. Midpoint: Daniel finds his late father’s logbook page and learns his father sank the boat. Kessler has been covering for him for three years. The tuition money was hush money.
• Act III: Daniel testifies with the damaged page and names his father. He loses the licence and the family’s version of itself, and the widow’s claim proceeds.

Structure should support the story rather than force it into a template. If your novel resists three acts, that’s information about your novel, and worth listening to before you spend six months forcing it.

Put this into your outline: Write one line each for your beginning, middle and end. Three sentences. If the middle sentence is vaguer than the other two, you’ve found the section that needs the most work.

Step 3: Develop Character and Plot Together

Character work isn’t a separate document you produce and then set aside. It’s the thing that determines what your plot beats can be.

A common characterisation problem in early manuscripts is authors telling readers who a character is instead of showing it. “Daniel was stubborn and distrustful” is a note to yourself, not a scene. The reader learns nothing they can feel.

Demonstrated instead: Daniel refuses a second diver on a job that clearly needs one. He photographs the valve before the hull is scrapped and tells nobody. When Elena Ferrer asks him directly whether the boat was sound, he says it was.

Same two traits. The reader now arrives at them independently, which is the only way characterisation actually lands.

What to Outline for your Protagonist in Your Novel:

Element	Question
External goal	What does this person consciously want?
Motivation	Why do they want it?
Conflict	What prevents them?
Internal need	What do they have to understand or change?
Fear or belief	What keeps them from changing?
End state	How are they different at the end?

For Daniel: he wants to know what happened to the Marisol (goal), because Tomas Ferrer died on it and his widow got nothing (motivation), and the answer implicates the family he owes everything to (conflict). What he needs to understand is that the loyalty he’s been paying for fifteen years was purchased silence (internal need). What stops him is a belief that debts are settled quietly and that speaking is a kind of betrayal (belief). By the end he testifies knowing exactly what it costs him and does it anyway (end state).

Now connect the two. Major plot events should force character decisions rather than happen around the protagonist. Daniel finding the wired seacock isn’t the plot beat. Daniel lying to Elena about it is, because that lie creates everything that follows.

Put this into your outline: Write your protagonist’s Goal, Motivation, Conflict and Change. Four lines. Then check your major beats and mark which ones force a decision from them. If most don’t, the protagonist is a passenger.

A Problem We’re Seeing With AI-Assisted Fiction

Authors increasingly arrive with material developed using AI tools: character notes, scene drafts, plot suggestions, chapter summaries, sometimes substantial partial manuscripts. This isn’t a complaint about the tools. It’s a description of what we find when the pieces get assembled.

The recurring issues are continuity issues. Repetition across separately generated sections. Character details that conflict between chapters. Story information that contradicts earlier story information. Passages that rush past important events and others that expand minor ones at length. Individually the pieces read acceptably. Together they don’t form one story.

A settled outline is one of the most effective ways to prevent this. It becomes the continuity reference: who the character is, what has already happened, where chapter fourteen sits in the sequence. Material written against that reference is far easier to reconcile than material produced freely and reconciled afterward.

Step 4: Build the Plot Through Cause and Effect

The difference between a plot and a sequence of events is one word. “And then” produces a list. “Because of this” produces a story.

Weak: Daniel finds the open seacock. Then Elena files a claim. Then Kessler pulls the county contract.

Stronger: Daniel finds the open seacock and lies to Elena about it, which he can’t live with, so he reports it anonymously, which reopens the investigation, which prompts Kessler to hire him onto the evidence review to keep him close, which gives Daniel access to the logbook.

Each beat produces the next. Map it in four columns:

Beat	What happens	Why it happens	What changes because of it
Inciting event	Daniel raises the Marisol and finds the seacock wired open	The county finally funded the salvage	A three-year-old accident becomes a possible crime
First decision	He lies to Elena, then photographs the valve	Loyalty to Kessler, and guilt about the lie	He now holds evidence nobody knows exists
Act I turn	He reports it anonymously	The lie is unsustainable	The investigation reopens; he’s committed
Complication	Kessler hires him to consult on the evidence	Kessler wants the salvage findings managed	Daniel is inside the cover-up, with access to Kessler’s records
Midpoint	He finds his father’s logbook page	The access Kessler gave him	The goal flips from “who did this” to “what do I do about my father”

Then apply the diagnostic. Take any major event and remove it. If the next major event still happens in essentially the same way, the causal link between them is weak and one of the two is probably decorative.

Put this into your outline: Build the table above for your six to eight biggest beats. The “why does it happen” column is where most outlines fall apart, and it’s the column worth filling in first.

Step 5: Turn Plot Beats Into Chapters and Scenes

Working outlines don’t need to be long. Ours generally run:

• premise and context
• genre
• target reader
• essential character information
• the complete story divided into chapters
• concise beats under each chapter explaining how it progresses

An outline should carry enough information to guide the manuscript and no more prose than that requires.

For individual scenes, five questions cover it:

• POV: whose head are we in?
• Goal: what does that character want in this scene?
• Conflict: what’s in the way?
• Change: what’s different by the end?
• Consequence: what does this set up?

Two scenes from the example:

Chapter 3, scene 2. POV Daniel. Goal: get the hull surveyed and signed off before anyone else examines the valve. Conflict: Elena is waiting on the dock and asks him directly whether the Marisol was seaworthy. Change: he says yes, and understands as he says it that he’s chosen a side. Consequence: he goes back that night and photographs the valve.

Chapter 17, scene 1. POV Daniel. Goal: find the missing logbook page in his father’s storage unit and prove Kessler removed it. Conflict: the page is there, and it’s in his father’s handwriting. Change: the person he’s been protecting and the person he’s been investigating turn out to be the same problem. Consequence: he can’t report this without destroying his sister’s name alongside Kessler’s.

A scene missing a Change is usually a scene that can be cut or folded into the one next to it.

Put this into your outline: Outline your next chapter in three to six beats. Not prose. Beats.

Step 6: Stress-Test the Outline Before Drafting

There is no formula that determines whether a story works. We don’t have one, and any guide claiming otherwise is selling something. What we have is a process: several experienced people review the author’s material, discuss the story direction, and develop the outline together.

When something needs improving, we don’t reject the author’s idea. We identify the specific issue, propose an alternative, put both in front of the author to compare, discuss it, and revise toward whichever direction they choose. The author decides. Our job is to make sure they’re deciding with full information.

Here’s a version of that review you can run on your own outline.

Novel outline stress test. Ten questions:

1. Can you state your protagonist’s main goal in one clear sentence?
2. Does the inciting event force something to change, or does it merely happen?
3. Does your protagonist make consequential decisions, or mostly react?
4. Do your major events cause or meaningfully influence what follows?
5. Does the middle develop the story, or does it delay the ending?
6. Are the stakes escalating, or repeating at the same level?
7. Do character traits appear through behaviour and choices rather than description?
8. Does the climax resolve the specific conflict the story set up?
9. Do the subplots affect the main story or the protagonist?
10. Is your protagonist meaningfully different at the end?

This isn’t a validated instrument. It’s a practical editorial framework for reviewing whether the story is ready to draft.

The Outline Is Not Sacred

An approved outline is not a fixed contract with the story. On our own projects, when a better idea surfaces during drafting, the team raises it with the author, explains what the change would improve, and if the author agrees, the outline is updated and the manuscript follows the stronger direction.

A novel outline is a working editorial plan, not a contract with the story.

No formula guarantees a good novel. A framework gives you direction. Experience and editorial judgment determine how that framework should bend for the specific story in front of you.

Complete Novel Outline Example

Fourteen major beats for the Marisol story:

1. Opening situation. Daniel salvages a routine wreck off Port Aurelia. He’s owed money by half the harbour and chases none of it.
2. Inciting event. The county contracts him to raise the Marisol, sunk three years ago, one crewman lost. He finds the seacock wired open.
3. Initial reaction. He files a neutral survey report and says nothing.
4. First major decision. Elena Ferrer asks him whether the boat was sound. He lies. That night he photographs the valve before the hull goes to scrap.
5. Act I turn. He sends the photographs to the county marine investigator anonymously. The case reopens.
6. Early complication. Kessler hires Daniel to consult on the salvage evidence, unaware Daniel is the source.
7. Escalation. Daniel finds his father’s logbook in Kessler’s office with a page missing. His sister Nina asks him to drop it. The tuition loan is in her name.
8. Midpoint. The missing page is in his father’s storage unit. Marco Reyes opened the seacock. Tomas wasn’t supposed to be aboard that day.
9. Consequences. The goal changes. Daniel offers Elena a private settlement out of his own money, doing exactly what Kessler did to his family.
10. Major setback. Elena refuses and files a civil claim. Kessler produces an old licensing complaint that ends Daniel’s salvage certification.
11. Lowest point. Nina finds out and stops speaking to him. Daniel burns the logbook page, then pulls it out of the barrel half-scorched.
12. Final decision. He agrees to testify, using the damaged page, naming his father.
13. Climax. At deposition Kessler offers one last way out. Daniel refuses, and tells Elena what happened to her husband himself, before the lawyers can.
14. Resolution. Licence gone, working as a deckhand. Nina still isn’t speaking to him. Elena’s claim proceeds. He owes nobody anything.

Beat 8 broken down to chapter level:

Chapter 17. Daniel drives to the storage unit in Bellhaven, ostensibly to clear it out before the lease ends.

• Beat 1: he finds his father’s gear, and delays opening the logbox
• Beat 2: the missing page is inside, in Marco’s handwriting, dated the morning of the sinking
• Beat 3: he reads the entry and understands Tomas swapped shifts at the last minute
• Beat 4: he sits in the car and does not call Nina, which is the first thing he’d normally do

That’s the path in full: premise to story beat to chapter to scene.

Copyable Novel Outline Template

Three levels. Use whichever matches how much planning you actually want.

Minimal outline (for discovery writers)

• Premise
• Beginning
• Inciting incident
• Midpoint
• Climax
• Ending

Standard novel outline

• Premise
• Genre
• Target reader
• Protagonist
• Goal
• Motivation
• Conflict
• Beginning
• Inciting event
• Major turning points
• Midpoint
• Major setback
• Climax
• Resolution
• Character change

Chapter and scene outline

• Chapter number
• POV
• Goal
• Major beats
• Conflict
• Change
• Consequence and next setup

Which Novel Outlining Method Should You Use?

Method	Best for	Planning level	Main strength	Main limitation
Three-Act Structure	Most fiction	Medium	Simple, flexible architecture	The middle can stay vague
Snowflake Method	Systematic planners	High	Develops complexity in stages	Can become over-detailed
Save the Cat	Beat-oriented genre writers	High	Clear pacing landmarks	Feels formulaic if followed rigidly
Hero’s Journey	Transformation and quest stories	Medium	Ties external journey to internal change	Wrong shape for many stories
Scene cards / visual outlining	Visual and nonlinear thinkers	Flexible	Easy to rearrange	Can fragment the whole
Minimal or tentpole outline	Discovery writers	Low	Preserves spontaneity	Offers less guidance

The Snowflake Method was developed by physicist and novelist Randy Ingermanson, who publishes it at Advanced Fiction Writing. Save the Cat comes from screenwriter Blake Snyder’s 2005 book of the same name; the official Save the Cat site maintains the beat sheet and its novel adaptations. The Hero’s Journey derives from Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), later adapted for writers by Christopher Vogler; the Joseph Campbell Foundation holds the primary material.

How Detailed Should a Novel Outline Be?

Detailed enough that you know how the story progresses, and no more detailed than that.

The excessive outlines we see share a profile: unnecessary exposition, descriptions repeated across chapters, generated filler, and information that never once affects a drafting decision. An outline has to tell you what the story is, how it progresses, and what happens chapter by chapter. Everything past that is a draft you’re writing twice.

Concise outlines are often the strongest ones.

Do Different Genres Need Different Outlining Methods?

Not really. We use the same core structural approach across fiction genres and adjust it to what the individual story needs. The adjustments are matters of emphasis:

• Romance: more weight on relationship progression and emotional turning points. Our romance novel outline guide covers that emphasis in detail.
• Mystery and thriller: clue placement, information control, reversals, and reveal logic. Who knows what, and when.
• Fantasy and science fiction: causality still runs the story. For complex worlds, magic systems, technology or invented history can be kept in a separate reference document so the story outline stays focused on the story. That’s the approach we’d suggest to anyone working with our fantasy writing team.

Be sceptical of genre-specific outlining formulas invented for the sake of having one.

Plotter vs. Pantser vs. Plantser

Outlining is a spectrum rather than a binary. Plotters plan extensively before drafting, pantsers discover the story while writing, and plantsers sit somewhere between.

Our own process sits somewhere in the middle: plan enough to establish direction and coherence, and leave room to improve the story during drafting.

When Should You Stop Outlining and Start Writing?

You probably have enough when you know who drives the story, what your protagonist wants, what opposes them, your major turning points, roughly how it ends, and what happens across the next several chapters.

You don’t need every scene planned. You don’t need the ending fixed. If you’re outlining chapter forty-one before you’ve written chapter one, the outlining has become the avoidance. Our guide to writing a fiction book covers what happens after this point.

Common Novel Outlining Problems We See as Publishers

The author knows the beginning and the ending but not the middle. One of the most common structural gaps we see. Beginnings and endings tend to arrive whole in the imagination; middles have to be built, beat by causal beat.

Characters describe themselves rather than reveal themselves. The manuscript states that a character is guarded, or ambitious, or kind, and nothing in their behaviour requires the reader to conclude it. Attach a decision to each trait in the outline rather than an adjective.

Character information changes across the manuscript. Ages, professions, relationships and personalities drift, particularly in manuscripts assembled from separately written or generated pieces. A settled character section prevents most of it.

Plot events happen without causal connection. The manuscript reads as “and then this happened.” Usually the events are fine and the logic between them was never worked out.

Some sections are rushed while others are overextended. A pivotal confrontation gets two pages and a travel sequence gets fifteen. Uneven emphasis is easier to spot in an outline, where you can compare how much space each event is getting before prose obscures it.

The outline is long but gives no direction. Pages of material, and still no answer to what happens in chapter eleven. Volume is not the same thing as usable structure.

If several of these describe your draft, they’re the sort of problems developmental fiction editing is designed to catch, and all are cheaper to fix at outline stage than after 80,000 words.

FAQ

How long should a novel outline be? There is no correct length. Some writers need only major beats and a chapter breakdown; others need considerably more detail. In our process, usefulness matters more than page count: the outline should tell you how the story progresses without becoming a second manuscript.

Do you need an outline to write a novel? No. Many published novelists draft without one. Outlining is worth doing because it surfaces structural, pacing and continuity problems while they’re still cheap to fix. Discovery writers often outline after a first draft instead.

Should you outline chapters or scenes? Chapters are enough for most writers. Outline at scene level when a section is complex, when multiple POVs intersect, or when you’re stuck and need to see where the momentum drops.

Can you change your outline while writing? Yes. An outline can change when a stronger idea emerges during drafting. In our own projects we discuss the change with the author first, and if they approve it, the outline is updated and the manuscript follows.

What should a novel outline include? At minimum: the premise, the protagonist’s goal and motivation, the central conflict, the inciting event, the major turning points, the midpoint, the climax, the resolution, and how the protagonist changes.

Can you outline a novel after you’ve already started writing? Yes, and it’s often more productive. Writing down what you’ve actually drafted, chapter by chapter, exposes gaps in causality and pacing that are invisible from inside the prose. This is called reverse outlining.

What’s the easiest way to outline a novel? Write your premise in one sentence, then one sentence each for the beginning, middle and end, then expand each into three or four major beats. That gives you ten to twelve beats and shows whether your middle has a real story or only a gap.

This guide incorporates observations from Writers of the West’s experience developing fiction projects with authors at every stage, from initial concepts and partial drafts through to completed manuscripts. If you’re working on a novel and want editorial help turning an outline into a finished book, our fiction ghostwriting team works with authors at any point in that process.