Plotting Your Novel

Plotting means deciding the major turns of your story before you write it, so your draft has somewhere to go. It's optional, plenty of writers find the story as they draft, but it's the most reliable way to avoid stalling halfway through. It matters most when you're writing against a deadline, like a November challenge (NaNoWriMo or similar), where a stuck day costs you the most.

Plotter, pantser, or somewhere in between

Plotters outline the whole book first. Pantsers (also called discovery writers) start writing and find the story as they go. Most writers land in between: they know the beginning, a handful of big turns, and the ending, and leave everything else open. If you're drafting fast, a light plan beats no plan, and you can keep it as loose as you like.

Pick one structure and stay with it

A story structure is a list of turns that tend to work in a novel. It's a scaffold, not a rule, and you can bend it. Three common choices:

• Three-act structure: setup, confrontation, resolution, usually broken into nine beats (setup, inciting incident, plot point one, rising action, midpoint, plot point two, climax, resolution, denouement). The simplest option, and a good first choice.
• Save the Cat: a more detailed 15-beat sheet adapted from screenwriting, with named turns like Catalyst, Midpoint, All Is Lost, and Dark Night of the Soul. Useful if you want to know roughly what should be happening at each point in the book.
• Genre-shaped structures: mystery and thriller (clues, suspects, reveals), romance (meeting, falling, choosing), and fantasy adventure (departure, trials, return) each have their own turns, which is why a romance and a thriller feel different even when both follow three acts.

Plot in beats, not scenes

A beat is one turn in the story, written in a sentence or two: what happens, and what changes because of it. Plot your beats first and let the scenes come while you draft. The strongest beat lists read as cause and effect, each one leading to the next: "Mara finds her sister's locked diary, so she picks the lock, which shows her that her sister lied about the trip." If your beats read as a list of unrelated events, that's where the story will stall.

Do the word-count math before you start

A 50,000-word draft in 30 days is about 1,667 words a day. If you only write five days a week, that's 20 writing days, or 2,500 words a day. Decide which one fits your life before day one, not on day ten.

Divide your target length by your number of beats to see how much room each one gets: 50,000 words across a 15-beat structure is about 3,300 words a beat, and across nine beats it's about 5,500. That tells you quickly whether a beat is a single scene or several.

50,000 words is a short novel. Many genres run longer, often 70,000 words or more, so check the usual length for yours. A month-long draft is often the first draft of a longer book, not the finished one.

What to have ready before day one

• Your main character and what they want.
• The ending, even if it is rough.
• Three to five big turns between the beginning and the end.
• A beat list for the structure you picked.
• A daily word target, and which days you will write.
• A rule for the days you fall behind: write the next beat, and fix the last one later.

When you fall behind

Don't go back to revise. Write the next beat, and if you hit a hole, leave a bracket in the text (like [fix: what does she know here?]) and keep going. Re-plotting in the middle of a fast draft is usually a way to avoid writing, so only do it if the story is truly broken. When the draft is done, the next step is editing it.

Plotting in Ledger

Ledger's Story page gives you beat sheets to start from: Save the Cat (15 beats), Three-Act (9 beats), and Mystery/Thriller, Romance, and Fantasy Adventure (12 beats each), or you can start from a blank page. Every beat can be renamed, rewritten, reordered, or deleted, and you can add your own. When you set up a book, Ledger picks a template from your genre, and you can change it afterward.