Template
Novel outline template
A three-act skeleton, a chapter grid, and a thread tracker. Copy it into Notion, Google Docs, Scrivener, or a text file — no signup, no email, nothing to download. A filled-in example follows underneath.
The template
Premise
One page, written before anything else. If it will not fit, the story is not decided yet.
- Logline: when [inciting event], [protagonist] must [goal] or [stakes]
- Whose story is it, and why now
- What the protagonist wants
- What the protagonist actually needs
- What stands in the way
- How it ends — write it down even if it changes
Act One — setup (first 25%)
Establish the normal, then break it.
- Opening image: the world before
- Inciting incident: what breaks the normal
- Refusal or hesitation, and what overrides it
- The decision that makes going back impossible
Act Two — confrontation (middle 50%)
The half that sags. Every entry here should raise cost, not just add event.
- First attempt, and why it is not enough
- New allies, new information, new rules
- Midpoint: the reversal that changes the goal or the stakes
- Things get worse for reasons the protagonist caused
- The low point: what is lost
Act Three — resolution (final 25%)
The answer to Act One's question, paid for by Act Two.
- What the protagonist finally understands
- The plan, and the cost of it
- Climax: the confrontation that settles the question
- Closing image: the world after, mirrored against the opening
Chapter grid — one row per chapter
Fill this in as you draft, not before. It becomes the map you revise from.
- Chapter number and working title
- POV character
- Where and when
- What changes by the end of it
- Which thread it advances
- Word count
Threads
Every question the story opens is a debt. Track when it comes due.
- The thread, in one line
- Chapter it opens
- Chapter it resolves — blank means still owed
A worked example
Blank headings are easy to nod at and hard to use, so here is the same structure filled in for an invented mystery — The Long Wednesday, about a small-town pharmacist who realises she has been dispensing a prescription to a man who died two years ago.
Logline
When a pharmacist notices she is filling a dead man's prescription, she must find out who is collecting it before the person using his name decides she has noticed.
Act One
Opening image: the shop at 6am, the same as every day for eleven years. Inciting incident: the refill request in a dead man's name. Hesitation: she tells herself it is a records error, and spends a week proving it is not. Decision: she keeps the signature slip instead of filing it.
Act Two
She traces the collections and finds three more names. Midpoint reversal: the pattern is not fraud, it is someone keeping people alive on paper so their benefits keep paying — and one of them is her own brother-in-law. The goal changes from exposing it to deciding whether to. Low point: she is the one who filed every script, and the record says so.
Act Three
What she understands: she was chosen precisely because she never looks up. Climax: she reports it and names herself in the report. Closing image: the shop at 6am, one week later, under new management, and she is on the other side of the counter.
Chapter grid, first three rows
| Ch | POV | Where | What changes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Nel | The pharmacy | The refill request arrives. |
| 2 | Nel | Records office | The death certificate is real. |
| 3 | Nel | The pharmacy | Someone collects it. She says nothing. |
Outlining after the fact
The chapter grid is more useful on a draft that exists than on one that does not. Filling it in from finished chapters shows you things a pre-written outline cannot: that four consecutive chapters are the same POV in the same room, that a thread you opened in chapter three has not been mentioned since, that the midpoint lands at 65% instead of 50%.
If you are a writer who has always bounced off outlining, try it in this direction before deciding it is not for you.
Common questions
How detailed should a novel outline be?
Detailed enough that you never sit down not knowing what the scene is for, and loose enough that you can still be surprised. For most writers that is one or two lines per chapter, not a page.
Do I have to outline before I write?
No. Plenty of finished novels were drafted without one. The useful compromise is a retrospective outline: draft freely, then fill in the chapter grid from what you actually wrote. It is the same document, built in the other direction, and it is far more accurate.
What if the draft stops matching the outline?
Update the outline. An outline that disagrees with the draft is not a plan any more, it is a record of what you used to think, and following it will make the book worse.
How many chapters should a novel have?
Between 25 and 40 for a typical 90,000-word novel at around 2,500 words a chapter. It is an output of chapter length and total length rather than a target of its own.