Novel Plotting Worksheets

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There are hundreds, possibly thousands 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.

novel plotting

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.

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 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 your 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!


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All documents are © Annie Neugebauer. These documents are intended for personal use only. Copyright applies. Please ask permission for anything other than personal record-keeping. If you’d like to share these with writers you know, please send them the link so they come visit me here. Thank you all so much for your support!

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