A comprehensive list of every scene in your manuscript, noting key details like POV, location, and purpose, used to analyze structure at a glance.
A scene list is an inventory of every scene in your manuscript, typically organized in a spreadsheet or document. Each entry usually includes the scene's location, point-of-view character, time, word count, and a brief note about what the scene accomplishes. It gives you a bird's-eye view of your entire novel's structure, making patterns and problems visible that you'd never catch reading chapter by chapter.
When you're deep inside a manuscript, you lose perspective. You can't see that your protagonist disappears for six chapters, or that every scene takes place in the same coffee shop, or that your timeline has a three-day gap nobody accounts for. A scene list pulls you out of the weeds and shows you the shape of your book. It's one of the simplest structural tools, and it catches problems that even careful rereading misses.
Create a simple scene list for your current project using a spreadsheet or table with five columns: Scene Number, POV Character, Location, Timeline (when it happens), and Purpose (one sentence on what the scene accomplishes). Fill it in for your first five chapters. Look at the patterns. Does one POV character dominate? Does the location change enough? Are there scenes without a clear purpose?