Novel Plotting Worksheets

There are dozens, possibly hundreds of articles on novel plotting on the web. There are a few plotting worksheets, with spaces and questions for you to fill in your own work – some of them are good. But I couldn’t find what I wanted, so I decided to make it and share it with you all.

The “Plotting Worksheet” is for writers who have scattered ideas (maybe a conflict + its resolution) that need to be worked into a basic plot structure. It is 1 page, bare bones, easy to view at a glance.

Plotting Worksheet

The “Plotting Worksheet with Prompts” is the same thing with questions to prompt your answers, in case some of the steps confuse you or you are familiar with different terminology, etc. It is two pages, and gives you more to chew on as you plot.

Plotting Worksheet with Prompts

Note: if you are in the early stages, it might be easiest to fill in this worksheet out of order. For instance, you might only know you inciting incident and your climax. But from climax, you can work backwards to deduce your darkest hour, etc.

I hope this helps. Of course, every story is different, and there truly are no rules to plotting. This isn’t meant to be “the right way” to do it – just a good place to get started. Tweak as desired. You can work out your sub-plots using the same worksheet. And don’t forget to flesh-out your characters with the Characters Chart Template.

Happy plotting!