The Complete Novel Planning Template Every Fiction Writer Needs Before They Start Writing

Estimated reading time: 13 minutes

No writer gets stuck halfway through a novel simply because they “ran out of ideas.” The part that no one wants to admit is that they get stuck because the structure falls apart.

Taking the time to write an outline? That’s boring. And who wants to be locked into rigid rules anyway? Follow the characters’ natural development? It sounds creative and almost dreamy on paper, but oftentimes leads you to write yourself into a corner.

Suddenly, you’re 40,000 words into a story that has no real backbone and no plan. You’re finding yourself rewriting chapters just to figure out what your book is even about.

All of this points to a truth that most first-time authors learn the hard way: The writing itself isn’t the hard part, but the process that leads up to it definitely is. And the process that comes after — professional copy editing— is what separates a manuscript from a finished book. If you skip that, you’ll end up paying for it later in rewrites, frustration, and half-finished manuscripts.

Every serious author — no matter what type of fiction you’re writing — has a planning system. And when your manuscript is ready, understanding the self publishing process is what turns that finished draft into a real book.

Consider this guide your complete fiction novel planning template. Let’s build it together. And when the writing is done, don’t skip professional proofreading — it’s the final quality check that separates amateur manuscripts from polished, publishable books.

The complete novel planning template

Having a working system you can actually use is crucial to getting your novel written. In this article, we’ll create a template that you can come back to again and again if your story starts drifting or your brain goes blank. If you’re ready to start making real progress instead of rewriting the same three chapters over and over, follow these steps to get your fiction story out there.

The hook

Before you write a single sentence, you need to ask yourself one question:

Why this story?

It’s not meant to be philosophical. You should be able to answer it in a way that’s clear and concrete. Say it out loud if you need to, because the hook is the glue that holds everything else together. If you can’t put it into words, your story will likely go in a thousand different directions, but if you can pull it out, everything else falls into place more easily.

For your template, answer these questions:

1. What’s the main idea of my story or novel?
2. What makes it compelling?
3. What do I want to explore with it?

It doesn’t have to be elaborate or detailed. It can be something as simple as: “A girl survives something she shouldn’t, and becomes something she doesn’t understand.” That alone is enough to give yourself a starting place.

The logline

This is where you sharpen your story. A logline forces you to get clear by answering four crucial questions:

1. Who is the protagonist?
2. What do they want?
3. What’s stopping them?
4. What happens if they fail?

For fiction authors, these are likely simple answers and easy to gloss over, but this part isn’t optional. You can have a cool idea or a full-blown story. Your template can include this as a starting point:

When (inciting incident), a (character) must (goal) before (incident stopping them).

Character core

You don’t happen to have a story with characters; your characters are the story. Readers don’t care nearly as much about what happens as they care about who Mit happens to. That means every character must have: a want, a need, a flaw, and a character arc (how they evolve). Skipping this means you’ll end up with a plot that works “on paper” but feels empty and hollow.

Story structure: the invisible framework

At this point in the template, most writers will either overcomplicate the process or avoid structure entirely. Both are major pitfalls. The structure doesn’t have to be rigid or cage your creativity. Instead, it’s there to support you. Without it, you get what we call the “and then” problem, where events just happen without really building toward anything meaningful.

At a minimum, you need a beginning, middle, and end to your story, but perhaps more importantly, you need to break it down structurally into:

1. Inciting incident
2. Rising tension
3. Midpoint shift
4. Climax
5. Resolution

Otherwise, your story will slowly but surely start to collapse under its own weight.

The snowflake expansion — from idea to story

The snowflake method is one of the most effective ways to build out a novel. Like its namesake, you start out small and then expand outward, like this:

One sentence – one paragraph – full structure.

This process forces you to get clear before you get complex, because if your story doesn’t work at the sentence level, it won’t magically fix itself at 80,000 words, either.

Chapter mapping

Chapter mapping is the part where your story becomes real. It’s also the part where most writers lose control of the wheel. That’s because each chapter should have a job, whether it’s to advance the plot or develop a character or build the world. If it doesn’t do at least one of those, it doesn’t belong.

For your template, you can outline it like this:

• Goal:
• Conflict:
• Outcome:
• Purpose:

Mapping out your chapters in this way will save you from the agony of writing 10,000 words that you later delete because you’re not sure where they fit in.

What happens next?

The next question in the process: What happens when your character fails? If nothing happens, then nothing else matters. It doesn’t have to have world-ending gravitas, but the impact has to be real. Creating the conflict and everything that surrounds it is vital to keeping your readers engaged in addition to driving the story forward.

Worldbuilding: not just for fantasy authors!

Although worldbuilding is popularly associated with fantasy authors, every story has a world. It can look like ours and even be a modern-day setting. There are still rules and social dynamics that need to be followed (or broken). Worldbuilding doesn’t have to just be about magic systems.

Your writing plan

Now we finally come to the “doing” part. And the execution is where many writers fall apart, because at this stage, if you don’t have a system, it’s easy to find it all overwhelming. We recommend breaking your novel down into bite-sized steps and setting clear goals with your writing. Just saying “write a fiction novel” is a lot to take in, but saying “write 1,000 words a day” or “write three chapters a week” is much more doable.

Don’t forget to be flexible

The better your plan, the easier it is to manage it. When you understand the structure well enough to adjust it along the way, you’ll be surprised to learn that nothing will break. Keeping to a strict, rigid plan? Yes, that will crumble, because your story will adjust in ways that you can’t know at this point.

A minor character could turn out to have a major arc you didn’t originally plan for. Your main character may develop sub-threads that you can’t see until you get them out of your head and onto paper. It’s impossible to know, but with the right flexibility, you’ll be able to adapt and plan ahead, and your fiction novel will be better for it.

Why this novel writing template works when others don’t

If you search for “novel planning template,” you’ll often see vague plans like “outline your book” without any real direction. Even experienced authors get stuck and ask themselves, “Great, but how much detail should I include? What order should things go in? What’s the most important thing to nail down and what can wait?”

This novel planning template works when others fall short because it walks you through the journey, from simple to complex. It forces you to get clear on the main parts (character and structure) and won’t let you get muddled in the details.

In fact, writers often try to skip the planning process specifically because it’s not writing. It feels boring, complex, and in the early days, unnecessary. You’re running on pure ideas and excitement, and you feel like you need to get it down or you’ll burst.

But skipping the template creation will slow you down later, because instead of doing the things you love, you’re stuck rewriting chapters, fixing plot holes, and trying to retroactively add structure. It’s like adding ingredients to a cake after you’ve already baked it.

Moving from planning to publishing

Now let’s skip ahead to the near future. Let’s say you’ve followed all of these steps. You didn’t just say, “I’d like to write fiction one day.” You actually did it. At this stage, you’re already ahead of most people who get stuck in the pure idea phase with no real foundation or plan.

But that’s also the part where things get eerily quiet. There’s plenty of writing advice out there from fellow fiction authors across every genre, but not many people talk about what the next step is like.

I wrote a novel, now what?

Writing a book solves a creative problem, but publishing a book is purely an execution problem. They require two different types of skill sets. When you’re writing, you’re coming up with ideas, crafting characters, and telling a story. At this point you’re actively switching from creative mode to polishing, packaging, and promoting the manuscript which, if you’ve never done it before, can feel overwhelming because you’re simply out of your depth.

That’s where BookBaby can help. Here are some of the many services BookBaby offers to help you get the traction and expert service you need to take your manuscript over the finish line.

Editing

Editing is often mistakenly assumed to be just proofreading and looking for things like grammar or spelling mistakes. But fiction book editing is much more than proofreading. With the right editing from BookBaby’s professional team of editors, you’ll discover things about your book that you didn’t even know existed.

Suddenly, plot holes get exposed, weak scenes get cut, and dialogue gets sharpened. BookBaby’s editors will never edit your book directly, meaning your content stays your own. What they will do is leave comments and track changes so that you can see their suggestions and understand why the edits were suggested.

Pay attention to which type of editing you choose — be it line editing, copy editing, or proofreading — as each one covers a different type of polish for your fiction novel.

Book design

BookBaby offers two different kinds of book design. The first is book formatting and interior design. This involves formatting for physical books as well as formatting for eBooks. BookBaby’s professional team of book designers will create a custom layout that matches the theme and message of your book.

Each book interior is custom crafted by a professional book designer, and we never use templates for interior book formatting, so you can be assured that the interior of your book will be as good as the story itself.

We also offer book cover design services where your cover is crafted by a professional graphic artist team. Whether you’re writing a murder mystery thriller or a fantasy novel, our team of experienced experts knows how to make your book stand out and get noticed on retail and digital shelves.

Proofing and printing

You never have to worry about changes or designs being applied to your book without your permission or approval. As part of our custom book printing services, we also offer a free prepress proofing option where you can see both an online digital representation of your cover and the interior of your book as well as get a physical copy.

We recommend checking carefully to make sure that the colors, layout, and style are the way you want, and that text, graphics, and other details are fully aligned and exactly the way you expect. It’s easy to want to skip over this process when you’re so close to publishing, but we recommend doing it just as a last-minute check to make sure everything looks perfect!

Distribution

Distribution is one of those areas that most writers underestimate. You could have a brilliant, award-winning story, but if no one can find it, it’s like having nothing at all. Distribution is what turns your book into something tangible that people can buy. BookBaby’s distribution service is the secret to getting your book listed (and sold) on Amazon.

Marketing

Marketing your book goes beyond distribution and turns your book into an actual vehicle that cements your credibility as an author. With BookBaby, you’ll get access to a variety of book advertising services that let you promote your book to readers on social media including Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, as well as other websites that are part of their respective networks.

We also offer ad services through our Ads for Authors program, including custom ads with a budget and timeframe you control. You’ll be able to see how much traffic your ads generatem as well as conversion data from your BookBaby dashboard.

Lifting the weight of publishing

Finishing your novel isn’t the end of the process, although it certainly feels like a huge relief! When you’ve finished your first draft, you’ll find yourself at a crossroads. Are you going to stop at this point, or are you going to follow through?

Writing a book up until this point has been a very private process. The characters, the plot, and the world all live in your head and on your screen. Publishing it is the moment where it becomes real. You’re about to put it out there into the hands of readers who love your genre and devour every new release they can get their hands on. Are you ready to make that happen?

The good news is that publishing can happen right after completing your first draft. You don’t need to “wait until you’re ready.” At this point of the process, you’ve already done the thing that most people say they want to do and then never follow up on. You planned a novel and you followed a novel planning template. You finished the book.

Until recently, everything that happened after writing “The End” was a confusing and complex process. Traditional publishing was a headache and full of cumbersome steps, and that’s if you could even get your book in front of prospective publishers. However, with Print On Demand services from BookBaby, you now have an actionable plan to move your novel forward.

That means that the very thing that got you through the writing process can be the very thing that gets you through publishing it. When you break it down, both major processes have the same things in common. You follow the same sequence of steps, such as:

• • Editing the manuscript so that it reads the way you intended
  • Design it so that it looks retail-ready alongside any traditionally published book
  • Print it so that the words are out there and not just on your screen
  • Distribute it so that readers can actually find it

It’s a step-by-step process, just like writing and outlining your chapters, characters, and plot.

What’s more, crossing that line has nothing to do with talent. Writers create, but authors finish, publish, and share. Ask yourself: Are you willing to carry your work all the way through, including the parts that aren’t exactly fun or creative?

If you are, then you don’t have to do it alone. While you could hypothetically chase down freelance editors, hire a cover designer, learn formatting tools, and get all set up on distribution platforms, it’s not the same as having a system in place that can handle it all for you. At this stage you’re mentally coming off the back of writing an entire book, and that’s no small task.

BookBaby removes all of the friction and overwhelm. We take all of the moving parts – the ones you could figure out on your own — and organize them into a flow that you can move through, piece by piece. No need to second guess every step or get stuck on a step and watch your momentum evaporate. Your book doesn’t need to sit on your hard drive for another six months, untouched.

Imagine a very short time from now in the future: you’re holding your book, and it’s real. Your name is on the cover. You finished it, followed through, and made it real. Now, you have the novel planning template and the next steps laid out for you, all you have to do is take the first step.

Get started with BookBaby.com and start with our free online quoter, where you can input information about your book and the services you need a-la-carte, giving you pricing on exactly what you need without the stuff you don’t. Get your story in readers’ hands, starting today!