Definition
An outline is a roadmap for your novel — a document that lays out the major beats, scenes, or chapters of your story before you write the actual prose. Outlines range from a loose list of bullet points to a detailed scene-by-scene breakdown with character notes, thematic threads, and subplots tracked across the entire narrative. There's no single right way to outline. The only question is how much structure helps you write better and faster without killing the spontaneity that makes writing feel alive.
Why It Matters
An outline doesn't remove creative freedom — it prevents the kind of structural problems that are agonizing to fix in revision. Writers who outline tend to finish their drafts faster and with fewer plot holes, saggy middles, and dead-end subplots. Even writers who hate outlining usually benefit from knowing their beginning, their ending, and two or three key turning points before they start. The outline is the cheapest place to make mistakes, because fixing a bullet point takes seconds while fixing a broken plot takes months.
Types of Outline
Famous Examples
Rowling is famous for her meticulous outlines — hand-drawn spreadsheets tracking every subplot, character, and timeline across all seven books. Her planning is why the series' foreshadowing lands so precisely.
Sanderson outlines extensively, creating detailed documents for each book's structure, character arcs, and magic system rules before drafting. He's openly shared his outlining process as a teaching tool.
King famously argues against outlining, preferring to start with a situation and discover the story by writing it. His success proves that not outlining can work — but he also admits to keeping notes and knowing his endings.
Common Mistakes
If your outline is so detailed that the actual writing feels like filling in blanks, you've gone too far. Leave room for discovery. The outline should make you excited to write, not bored because you already told the whole story.
An outline is a plan, not a contract. When you discover something better while drafting — a character who wants to go a different direction, a twist you didn't see coming — let the outline bend. Update it to reflect the new direction.
Try a tentpole outline: just your beginning, ending, and three major turning points. That's five bullet points. It gives you direction without constraining how you get there, and you might be surprised how much it helps.
For every major plot beat in your outline, note what your protagonist believes or feels at that point. If their internal state isn't shifting across the outline, you have a sequence of events but not a story.
Try It Yourself
Take your current project and write a tentpole outline in under ten minutes: your opening situation, your ending, and three major turning points between them. Each should be one sentence. Don't overthink it — just capture the spine of the story. Then look at what you've written and ask: does each turning point raise the stakes? Does the ending feel earned by what comes before? If not, move the tentpoles until it does.
Novelium's plotting tools let you outline at whatever level of detail works for you — from tentpole beats to scene-by-scene breakdowns — and reorganize with drag-and-drop.
Outline your novel, your way
Novelium's flexible plotting tools let you outline at any level of detail — from a handful of tentpole beats to a full scene-by-scene breakdown. Drag, drop, and restructure until your story clicks.