How to Create a Working Scene List for Your Novel

Does outlining give you a headache? There's a more intuitive way.

I’ve been writing novels since the early 2000s, and I’ve never outlined any of them in the early stages. For the first seventy pages or so, I work from instinct and from the drive of the story itself. Instinct and narrative drive, however, will only take you so far. Later, after the invisible person in the driver’s seat has disappeared and left the car careening toward the guardrails, I begin making scene lists. I admit this isn’t the most efficient way to write a novel, but it’s what works for me. Slowly, perhaps, but it works.

I do create an informal outline late in the process, after a draft is finished or mostly finished. That’s when I go back and see what I wrote and where I put it. The late-in-the-process outline helps me think about how scenes and chapters might be rearranged, and which ones should be left on the editing room floor.

I tend to leave a lot of pages on the editing room floor—or, digitally speaking, in my “cuts” file. This is where a couple hundred pages or more of any given novel go to live in limbo, safe from total deletion until I can call them back from the dead—which, by the way, I rarely do. Once a scene is in the cuts file, it usually stays there. Like those clothes you take out of your closet and put in a box for “later.” Later never comes. Your closet is plenty full (and plentiful) without those discarded things.

If you do love outlines, an excellent tool is Plottr, which helps you visualize your novel’s structure on a color-coded timeline. You can outline from scratch, or you can use one of Plottr’s dozens of templates, which range from classics like the 3-Act structure to genre-specific templates like the 24-chapter mystery outline. I’ve used it twice to reverse outline a novel after the draft was finished. I found it incredibly helpful.