How I Plan My Novels

Hi there—thanks for stopping by.

Every novel I write starts long before the first sentence hits the page. Planning, for me, isn’t about locking the story into a rigid outline; it’s about building enough structure that I can write with confidence instead of hesitation. In this post, I’ll walk through my overall approach to planning a novel—how I think, organize, and prepare before drafting. Future posts will zoom in on specific stages and the tools I use to support them.

The Seed

My planning process is a hybrid of the Snowflake method, Save the Cat, and a certain amount of untreated insanity. I start small—very small. One sentence. That sentence has one job: describe the entire novel in plain language, without being clever about it.

For The Templars of Alderath, that sentence looked like this:

A family must survive in a world run by an evil theocracy after finding their parents were ancient warriors that had been branded heretics.

That’s it. No subplots. No symbolism. Just the spine of the story. If I can’t explain what the book is about in one breath, I don’t understand it well enough yet.

Once that sentence feels solid, I expand it into a short paragraph. Just a few more sentences—but those sentences do a surprising amount of work. Suddenly the scope becomes visible. The arc starts to take shape. Sometimes this paragraph even reads like back-cover copy, and honestly, it could be used that way later.

Here’s the expanded version for The Templars of Alderath:

A family must survive in a world run by an evil theocracy after finding their parents were ancient warriors that had been branded heretics. When they are driven from their homes, four siblings must flee or face execution. Their harrowing journey takes them across the kingdom and the world beyond as they seek a Lost Master—their only hope of saving their parents and themselves. Along the way, they uncover ancient secrets that threaten to expose the lies of the empire.

The goal here isn’t polish. It’s clarity. This paragraph exists to lock in what the novel is—its scope, its emotional center, and the general trajectory of the characters.

Even at this early stage, a lot is revealed. This is an epic journey, but it’s family-focused. The parents aren’t immediately killed, which hints at tone. In a grim story, they’d be executed in chapter two and everyone would spiral into betrayal and despair. That’s not what’s happening here. This is about siblings surviving together, growing together, and ultimately saving their parents—not just from an empire, but from being erased by history.

If you know stories, you can probably already name a few relatives this one might sit next to on a bookshelf.

I’ll let you guess which ones.

The Summary

Once I have the paragraph locked in, I expand it into a full story summary. If memory serves, proper Snowflake doctrine says this should be about a page. I… do not follow that rule. Depending on how hard I fall into it, this summary can run several thousand words.

The key thing is what it isn’t. This is not prose. I’m not writing a condensed version of the novel, and I’m not worried about rhythm, beauty, or line-level craft. This is me talking to myself—explaining the story as if I’m pitching it to the only audience that actually matters at this stage.

The tone is conversational but deliberate. Clear. Structured. Some sections get hand-waved with a sentence or two when I know where things are going but don’t feel like drilling down yet. Other sections explode into detail because the act of writing sparks new ideas, connections, or solutions. When that happens, I follow it and write everything down.

You could call this a train-of-thought brainstorm, but it’s more disciplined than that. I’m not throwing spaghetti at the wall. I’m walking through the story from beginning to end, testing logic, character motivation, cause and effect, and escalation. If something feels thin or confusing here, it will absolutely collapse during drafting.

By the time I’m finished, this document becomes my design blueprint. Not a rulebook, but a map. I know where I’m going, why I’m going there, and what needs to happen along the way.

Once that’s in place, I move on to the next phase.

That’s where things start getting a little more… visual.

The Diagram

This is where my software engineer brain finally gets a turn at the wheel.

Once the summary is done, I move the story into a diagram. I use a template that’s essentially a UML-style design diagram built in Obsidian’s canvas feature. I’ll dig into that setup in a future post, but the specifics don’t really matter. Any tool that lets you create nodes, connect them, and drag them around will do the job.

At its core, the template is a modified Save the Cat structure. The funny thing is, I’d been using a version of this for years before I ever heard of Save the Cat. When I finally watched a breakdown of it, I realized I’d independently reinvented about eighty percent of the same beats. So I pulled the official terminology into my toolbox—not because it’s sacred, but because having a well-documented, commonly discussed framework is useful when things start getting messy. There’s always something to reference when the plot threatens to wander off into the woods.

That said, once I start filling in the diagram, Save the Cat quickly turns into Save the Horse… or maybe the elephant. I take the full story summary and explode it into scenes, arcs, reveals, and turning points. The result is much larger and more complex than a standard beat sheet. The Templars of Alderath, for example, has multiple moments that could qualify as a “midpoint” or “dark night of the soul,” because the story is juggling multiple points of view and overlapping arcs.

Even so, I still anchor everything to major milestones. Structure matters—especially when you’re dealing with branching plots, secrets, and long-term payoffs. Readers don’t care whether you followed a formula. They care that the story makes sense.

This is where I’ll echo something I wrote about before: outlines don’t kill creativity. They free it. Once the foundation is solid, my brain is free to focus on better ideas instead of basic organization.

By the end, this diagram is the book—beginning to end, scene by scene. From this point on, it takes over design duties from the summary and becomes the main thing I iterate on as the story continues to evolve.

Iteration

Once the full diagram is in place, I start iterating. This is where the story gets sharpened.

I map out the character arcs in detail—heroes, side characters, and villains alike. Everyone gets an arc, even if it’s a short one. I want to know where each character starts, where they end, and what forces them to change along the way. If an arc feels flat, I pipe in scenes, moments, or pressure points that give it weight.

This is also where foreshadowing gets threaded in on purpose. Big reveals don’t just happen; they’re prepared for. I’ll seed earlier scenes with small details, lines of dialogue, or visual beats that quietly set up what’s coming later. Nothing flashy. Just enough that, in hindsight, it feels inevitable.

By the time this phase is finished, the story has effectively been written several times through focused refinement of this diagram. All the major elements are designed, supported, and aligned for maximum impact.

At this point, I’m no longer figuring out what the story is.

I’m making sure it lands.

The Chapter List

At this point, the diagram is essentially a scene list. The story exists beat by beat, moment by moment. But scenes and chapters aren’t always the same thing, so this is where I translate one into the other.

I take each scene and build out a chapter list alongside it—adding short chapter descriptions and rough outlines. Sometimes it’s a clean one-to-one relationship: one scene, one chapter. Other times, a chapter holds multiple scenes that belong together emotionally or thematically. This is where I make sure those moments live side by side instead of being awkwardly split apart.

The goal here isn’t precision. It’s flow. Chapters should feel cohesive, purposeful, and readable, not like arbitrary stopping points. I’m thinking about momentum, breathing room, and how a reader experiences the story in chunks rather than beats.

By the time the chapter list is finished, I have a clear roadmap for drafting. I know what happens in each chapter, why it exists, and how it moves the story forward.

From here on out, I’m not guessing.

I’m executing.

Drafting and Editing

With the diagram finished—and all the other planning documents in place—the story is finally ready to be written. But the diagram doesn’t get retired once drafting begins. In practice, it becomes one of my most useful tools.

During drafting, I keep it close. It’s there to remind me what each chapter is doing, but more importantly, it helps me manage emergences—those story elements that appear once the characters start breathing and the narrative gains momentum. A line of dialogue lands harder than expected. A minor character demands more space. A thematic thread suddenly becomes obvious. Because the diagram already holds the full structure, adding or adjusting these elements is straightforward instead of disruptive.

More than once, that “living diagram” saved me from breaking the story while trying to improve it. It let me fold new ideas in cleanly and set them up properly for maximum payoff.

And this doesn’t stop at drafting. I rely on the diagram just as heavily during editing—but that’s a conversation for another post. This one’s already long enough.

Conclusion

That’s the full arc of how I plan a novel—from a single sentence all the way to a living diagram that carries me through drafting and editing. By the time I write the first chapter, the story has already been tested, reshaped, and strengthened multiple times.

Planning, for me, isn’t about control. It’s about confidence.

In future posts, I’ll dig deeper into individual stages and the tools behind them. Until then, thanks for reading—and if your process looks nothing like mine, that’s probably a good sign for your sanity.