Book Outline Template (Free, Copy and Paste)

A book outline template is a fill-in plan for a whole book: a one-sentence premise, the main characters, the three acts with their turning points, and one row per chapter saying what happens. The template below is free to copy. It works as a novel outline template as it stands, and there are shorter and longer versions further down for pantsers, for plotters who want The Board, and for non-fiction.

It is built from the structure writers already use: Syd Field's three acts, Blake Snyder's Board of cards, and Randy Ingermanson's scene list. Each is credited where it appears, in its author's own words.

What Goes in a Book Outline Template?

Five parts, in the order you fill them in:

The ending sits second for a reason. Joseph Heller told The Paris Review: "I can't start writing until I have a closing line." Not every novelist works that way, but a template is the place to find out whether you do.

The Book Outline Template

Copy this into any document and fill it in from the top.

BOOK OUTLINE

Working title:
Genre and length (words):
Premise (one sentence): When [character] [inciting event],
  they must [goal] or else [stakes], but [obstacle].
Ending (two or three sentences):
Theme, if you know it (one line):

CHARACTERS
Protagonist:
  Want (external goal):
  Need (what they must learn):
  Flaw (what holds them back):
Antagonist or opposing force:
  Want:
  Why they are in the way:
Two or three supporting characters (name, role, what they want):

ACT ONE: SET-UP (about the first 25%)
  Opening: who, where, what is wrong
  Inciting incident: the event that starts the story
  Plot Point I: the turn that carries the story into Act Two

ACT TWO: CONFRONTATION (about 25% to 75%)
  First half: the new situation, first attempts
  Midpoint (about 50%): the turn that changes the goal or raises the stakes
  Second half: things get worse, the opposition closes in
  Plot Point II: the low point, or the discovery that leads to the ending

ACT THREE: RESOLUTION (about the last 25%)
  Climax: the final confrontation
  Resolution: how things stand now, and who the protagonist has become

CHAPTER-BY-CHAPTER OUTLINE (one row per chapter)
Ch | POV | Act/beat | What happens | Goal | Conflict | Outcome or hook | Words planned
1  |     |          |              |      |          |                 |
2  |     |          |              |      |          |                 |
3  |     |          |              |      |          |                 |
(add rows to the end of the book)

SUBPLOTS (one line each, with the chapters they touch)

QUESTIONS TO ANSWER WHILE DRAFTING

The percentages follow the usual rule for turning Field's screenplay pages into a novel: Act One a quarter, Act Two half, Act Three a quarter. Field's own first plot point lands a little earlier than 25%, and the three-act structure page has his exact pages and what they come to in words. Treat them as proportion, not deadlines.

How Do You Fill In a Book Outline Template?

1. Write the premise first, in one sentence. If it will not fit in one, the book is not settled yet, and that is worth knowing before chapter one.
2. Write the ending. Two or three sentences. It can change later; plan towards something.
3. Give each main character a want, a need and a flaw. The want drives the plot; the need is the change. Character arc types covers the shapes that change can take.
4. Fill in the turning points before the acts. Inciting incident, Plot Point I, Midpoint, Plot Point II, climax. Five events give the book its skeleton.
5. Fill in the chapter rows between them. Work from turning point to turning point, so each chapter has somewhere to go.
6. Check the proportions. Count the rows in each act. If Act One has half the chapters, the set-up is too long or Act Two is too thin.
7. Leave a list of open questions. An outline that answers everything leaves the draft nothing to find.

How many rows you need depends on the book. No style authority or publisher sets a chapter count, as how many chapters a novel should have explains, so start with the number of distinct events you have and let that decide.

What Is a Chapter Outline Template?

A chapter outline template is the chapter rows on their own, one line per chapter, with the columns that matter most while drafting. The essential ones come from Randy Ingermanson's Snowflake Method, step 8: "Make just one line for each scene. In one column, list the POV character. In another (wide) column, tell what happens." He suggests an extra column for how many pages you expect to write.

CHAPTER OUTLINE
Ch | POV | What happens (wide) | Goal | Conflict | Outcome or hook | Words planned

The goal, conflict and outcome columns keep each chapter moving: someone wants something, something stops them, and the chapter ends changed. That is Dwight Swain's scene and sequel pattern in three cells. The full Snowflake Method, which builds up to this list from a single sentence, is on its own page.

A Worked Example

A filled-in outline for an original 75,000-word novel, The Tuner. Six of its 24 chapter rows are shown.

Premise. When a piano tuner finds her missing brother's handwriting inside a church organ, she must find out why he vanished, or lose the only family she has left, but the town that raised her would rather she stopped asking.

Ending. Nell finds Danny alive, working a fishing boat two hundred miles up the coast. He left by choice. She goes home without him, and for the first time in years she lets someone else look after her.

Characters.

• Nell Ashby, 34. Want: find Danny. Need: stop holding everyone together on her own. Flaw: control.
• Father Collier, the parish priest. Want: keep the town's peace. In the way because he helped Danny leave and promised not to tell.
• Danny Ashby, 29, missing for three years.

Turning points. Inciting incident: the note in the organ (ch. 2). Plot Point I: Nell learns Danny's bank card was used after he "drowned" (ch. 6). Midpoint: the priest admits Danny asked to disappear (ch. 12). Plot Point II: Nell's search costs her the tuning contract that pays her rent (ch. 18). Climax: the harbour at Amble (ch. 22).

Six rows are enough to show the shape: the turning points are fixed, and the eighteen chapters between them are where the drafting happens.

Is There a Book Outline Template for Pantsers?

Yes: a short one. Discovery writers find the book by writing it, and a full chapter grid gets in the way. Keep the top of the template and drop the rest:

PANTSER OUTLINE
Premise (one sentence):
Ending, or the question the book must answer:
Protagonist: want, need, flaw
Three signposts you think you are heading for:
After each writing session: one line for each chapter you wrote

The last line is a reverse outline. Written after the draft rather than before it, the chapter rows become a map of what you found, which is what a revision pass works from. Heller sits between the two camps: he wrote the first chapter of Catch-22 in a burst, then, in his words, "One year later, after much planning, I began chapter two." The full spectrum, with what Martin, King, Murdoch and others say, is on plotter vs pantser.

Is There a More Detailed Template for Plotters?

Blake Snyder's Board is the longest common form, from Save the Cat! (2005), chapter five. It splits the story "into four equal parts: Act One, the first half of Act Two, the second half of Act Two, and Act Three", one row each on The Board, and caps the cards: "Forty cards. That's all I'm going to give you for your finished board. That's roughly 10 cards per row."

THE BOARD (four rows)
Row 1  Act One                         | card | card | card | ... about 10
Row 2  Act Two, first half to Midpoint | card | card | card | ... about 10
Row 3  Act Two, Midpoint to Act Three  | card | card | card | ... about 10
Row 4  Act Three                       | card | card | card | ... about 10

Snyder's forty cards are scenes for a screenplay of around 110 pages, not chapters of a novel. A novel usually has more scenes than that, so keep his four rows and his proportions and let the card count grow. His fifteen beats, with their positions as percentages, are explained on the Save the Cat beat sheet page and fit straight into the "Beat" column of the chapter rows.

Planning on the wall is old. At Rowan Oak, William Faulkner's house in Mississippi, the office he added around 1954 still carries the plot outline of A Fable, written on the wall in his own hand in graphite and red grease pencil. The house calls it his "working plan for the novel".

What Does a Non-Fiction Book Outline Template Look Like?

Non-fiction replaces the acts with an argument, and publishers say what they want to see. The University of California Press asks for "a detailed outline of the book with paragraph-length descriptions of each chapter" that shows "what each chapter contributes to the logic of your argument, and how the chapters relate to one another." Princeton University Press asks for "a list of planned chapters, including proposed chapter titles" with "a brief paragraph describing the contents of each chapter."

NON-FICTION BOOK OUTLINE
Working title:
The book's argument or promise (one sentence):
Reader: who it is for, and what they will know or be able to do at the end
Estimated length (words):

Chapter 1: [title]
  One paragraph: what the chapter covers and what it contributes to the argument
  Key points or evidence:
  Leads into chapter 2 because:
Chapter 2: [title]
  (repeat for every chapter)

The "leads into" line is the non-fiction version of a chapter hook. It shows the chapters build on one another rather than sitting side by side. Memoir is closer to fiction: use the novel template, with real events as the turning points.

How Do You Lay Out a Book Outline Template in Deckle?

Deckle is a novel-writing app, and its Outliner is a board of cards, one for every chapter, scene and folder in the book, each with a synopsis. The template above maps onto it directly, and once it is built you can save it as a project template and start every new book from it.

1. Select the Draft in the Binder and click Outliner in the left-hand menu bar.
2. Use Add › Folder three times and name the folders "Act One: Set-Up", "Act Two: Confrontation" and "Act Three: Resolution". Write the premise in the Act One card's synopsis, so it heads the board.
3. Open an act by clicking the folder badge on its card. Use Add › Chapter for each chapter row, and write what happens in the card's synopsis.
4. Switch the view pill from Grid View to List View. Every chapter is now a row with its synopsis, status, label and word count, which is the chapter outline itself.
5. Add the template's other columns with the + at the end of the list header (Add custom column). Make "Beat" a Dropdown with your turning points as its options, and "Goal" and "Words planned" as Text.
6. For point of view, open a chapter and click the pencil beside Status in the Inspector's Properties (Edit labels & statuses) and switch to the Labels tab. Make a label for each POV character, give each a colour, and set one on every chapter.
7. Put the characters in the Codex. A Character entry comes with sections for Motivation & Goals, Flaw / Inner Conflict, The Lie They Believe and Arc, which hold the want, the flaw and the need.
8. To reuse the layout, save it before any real prose goes in: File › Export as Template…, give it a name, a description and a creator name, then Choose Location & Export. Deckle writes a .deckletemplate file with the chapters, synopses, labels, columns and Codex entries, and clears the title, author, trash and writing history.
9. For the next book, choose New Project, switch to From Template File…, click Browse… and pick the file. The new project opens with the outline ready to fill in.

A template carries everything in its chapters, prose included, so a template exported from a book in progress takes that book's text with it. Export from the empty outline, or swap the prose for placeholder text first; the export window reminds you. The details are on the project templates page. When the draft outgrows the plan, the Outliner is also where you restructure: drag a chapter from one act to another and the book moves with it.

Common Mistakes

• Starting with chapter one. Fill in the premise, the ending and the turning points first. Chapter rows written in order tend to wander.
• Treating the percentages as deadlines. Field's own word for his plot point pages is "usually". A Midpoint at 55% is fine.
• Copying Snyder's forty cards as forty chapters. His cards are screenplay scenes. A novel's count is its own.
• Outlining every line. A row should say what happens and why it matters, not script the chapter. Leave the draft something to discover.
• Never updating the outline. Once the draft changes the plan, change the rows, or the outline stops being useful for revision.
• Using a fiction template for an argument. A non-fiction outline needs each chapter's contribution to the argument, which a plot template has no place for.

Sources

Retrieved 31 October 2026.

• Joseph Heller, interviewed by George Plimpton, The Art of Fiction No. 51, The Paris Review 60 (Winter 1974), for the first chapter of Catch-22, "after much planning", and the closing line.
• Blake Snyder, Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need (Michael Wiese Productions, 2005), chapter five, "Building the Perfect Beast", for The Board, its four rows and forty cards. Read through Open Library's search inside (archive.org).
• Randy Ingermanson, The Snowflake Method for Designing a Novel, Advanced Fiction Writing, step 8, for the scene list.
• Rowan Oak, University of Mississippi, The House, for the outline of A Fable on Faulkner's office wall.
• University of California Press, Book Proposal Guidelines, for the chapter outline in a non-fiction proposal.
• Princeton University Press, Proposal Guidelines, for the proposed chapter outline.
• Syd Field, Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting (expanded edition, Delacorte Press, 1982), for the three acts and plot points, as set out on the three-act structure page.