How to outline a novel, from premise to chapter list

To outline a novel, work from the top down in four passes: write the premise in one sentence, decide roughly how it ends, name the handful of turning points that get you from one to the other, then break the space between them into a chapter list with one line per chapter. Each line says what changes in that chapter. That’s an outline. Everything finer, the scenes and the beats inside them, can wait until you’re about to write them.

What does a novel outline actually need?

Less than most templates ask for. A working outline answers four questions:

1. What is the story about? One sentence: who wants what, and what’s in the way.
2. Where does it end? Not the final paragraph, just the situation. Who has what, who doesn’t, what’s been learned.
3. What are the turns? The four to six moments where the story changes direction and can’t go back.
4. What happens in each chapter? One line each, in order.

Character backstories, maps and themes are useful, but they are a different document. An outline is about order: what happens, and what it causes next.

How do you outline a novel, step by step?

Here is the whole method on one running example: a quiet mystery set in a wet October in a harbour city.

1. Write the premise in one sentence

Name a person, what they want, and the problem.

When her brother Tom, who is never late, misses their Thursday coffee at Café Mercer, Lisa starts looking for him and finds he’s been living a second life at the depot where he works nights.

If you can’t get it into one sentence, you may have two books, or you don’t yet know which character the story belongs to. Both are worth finding out now rather than at chapter nineteen.

2. Decide where it ends

Write a few lines about the final situation, even if you change it later. An ending gives every chapter something to move toward.

Lisa finds Tom. He’s safe, but he’s not who she thought, and she has to decide whether to keep his secret.

You don’t need the last scene. You need a destination.

3. Name the turning points

A turning point is a moment after which the story can’t go back to how it was. Most novels have four to six that matter. Write each as one line, and put them in order between the premise and the ending:

1. Tom doesn’t come to the café, and doesn’t answer his phone.
2. At the depot, Lisa learns Tom quit three weeks ago.
3. She finds a second address for him on Mercer Street.
4. The person living there knows exactly who Lisa is.
5. Tom calls, and asks her to stop looking.

Read them aloud in sequence. Each should cause, or at least open the door to, the next. If a turning point could swap places with its neighbour without anything breaking, it probably isn’t turning anything yet.

4. Break it into a chapter list

Now fill the space between the turns. Give each chapter one line, and make that line say what is different at the end of it.

1. Lisa waits at Café Mercer. Tom doesn’t come.
2. She goes to his flat; his post hasn’t been collected.
3. At the depot, she learns he quit three weeks ago.
4. A coworker gives her a name, and lies about how he knows it.
5. Lisa finds the Mercer Street address on an old delivery slip.
6. The woman at that address knows Lisa by sight.
7. Lisa learns what Tom has been doing at night.
8. She tells no one, and starts lying for him herself.
9. Tom calls and asks her to stop.
10. She doesn’t.
11. Lisa and Tom meet at the depot after closing.
12. She decides what to keep, and what to tell.

Twelve lines for a short novel. Your list might be twenty-five or forty. The length matters less than this: no line is just “stuff happens”.

What makes a good chapter outline line?

A chapter line is only useful if it names a change. Compare:

Before:

Ch. 3: Lisa looks for Tom.

After:

Ch. 3: At the depot, Lisa learns Tom quit three weeks ago, and stops believing he’s just running late.

The first could describe half the book. The second tells you what the chapter is for, where it happens, and what Lisa believes when it’s over. When you sit down to write chapter three, you know which scene ends it.

A quick test for every line on your list: if you deleted that chapter, would the next one still make sense? If yes, the chapter is either doing something you haven’t written down, or it can go.

A novel outline template you can copy

Paste this into any document and fill it in from the top. Stop when you reach a line you can’t answer; that’s the next thing to figure out.

PREMISE (one sentence)
  Who wants what, and what's in the way:

ENDING (two or three lines)
  Who has what at the end, and what has changed:

TURNING POINTS (four to six, in order)
  1.
  2.
  3.
  4.
  5.

CHAPTER LIST (one line each: what is different by the end)
  Ch. 1:
  Ch. 2:
  Ch. 3:
  ...

OPEN QUESTIONS
  Things you don't know yet, so you stop pretending you do:

The last section matters more than it looks. An outline that admits what it doesn’t know is one you’ll keep using.

How do you go from chapters to scenes?

Once a chapter line is clear, split it into scenes: usually one per place or one per unbroken stretch of time. “At the depot, Lisa learns Tom quit” might be two scenes, the front office and the car park afterwards. Then, just before you write a scene, list the separate things that happen in it. That last layer is beats, and there’s a full guide to it in how to write story beats.

Keeping the levels apart is the point. The chapter list stays short enough to read in a minute, and the scene detail gets written when you know the most about it.

Plotter vs pantser: do you even need an outline?

Plotters outline before they write; pantsers write to find out what happens. Most writers end up somewhere in between, and the four passes above work for both.

If you’re a plotter, do all four before chapter one. Then let the chapter list change as you write, because it will.

If you’re a pantser, write the premise and the ending, then draft. When you lose your way, usually around the middle, write the chapter list for what you’ve already written. It shows you where the story actually turned, which is often not where you planned, and what the next turn needs to be.

If you’re starting your first novel, stop at the turning points. Five lines is enough to keep you from writing in circles, and few enough that you won’t spend a month outlining instead of writing.

Outlining a novel in ProseSpun

ProseSpun is a fiction writing app built around writing plain and keeping what reads better; you can see how it works on the ProseSpun homepage. It doesn’t have a separate outline document. Your outline is the shape of the manuscript itself.

The Manuscript tab is a contents page. Each chapter is a line with its numeral, its title and its word count; each scene sits under it with its name, when you last worked on it and its opening line. Use + Chapter and + Scene to lay out the book before you’ve written much of it, and name the chapters after the lines on your chapter list: “Tom doesn’t come”, “The depot”, “Mercer Street”. Rename and delete sit on each line, and you reorder by dragging: chapters anywhere in the book, scenes within their chapter.

Beats are the scene-level plan. Inside a scene, start a line with // and it becomes a beat, a note of what should happen next, kept apart from your prose and your word count. When you’re ready, you can draft from it or write it yourself.

Summaries come from what you write. Once a scene has prose, ProseSpun writes a short summary of it in the background, rolls scene summaries up into chapters and the chapters into a synopsis of the whole story. You don’t write or maintain these; they come from the prose itself, so when you ask for a suggestion in chapter twelve, it knows what happened in chapter two. There’s more on that in A novel is bigger than any model’s memory.

Related reading: How to write a character arc and How to avoid continuity errors in writing.

Frequently asked questions

How detailed should a novel outline be?

Detailed enough that you know what each chapter is for, and no more. One line per chapter that names what changes is plenty for most writers. Scene detail is better written just before you draft the scene, when you know the characters and the story best.

How many chapters should a novel outline have?

As many as the story needs. A short novel might have twelve to twenty chapters and a long one forty or more. Outline the turning points first and the chapter count will follow from how much has to happen between them.

What’s the difference between a novel outline and a synopsis?

An outline is a working tool written before or during drafting, in the order things happen, one line per chapter. A synopsis is a few paragraphs that tell the whole story, usually written after a draft exists, often for someone else to read.

Is it OK to change the outline while writing?

Yes. An outline is a guess about a book you haven’t written yet. When the draft goes somewhere better, update the chapter list to match, so the next time you’re lost it shows where you really are.

Spend the next ten minutes on one sentence of premise and five turning points, and see which chapter you want to write first.