Plotting a novel sounds straightforward. Come up with an idea, invent a few interesting characters, throw a problem into the mix, and watch the story unfold.
Except a sequence of events isn’t a plot. Your protagonist can cross three kingdoms, fight a dragon, uncover an ancient prophecy, and endure dinner with their future in-laws. And yet, somehow, nothing happens. Well, things happen. That’s the problem.
A good plot is a causal nexus of events in which each development changes what happens next. Characters make decisions, those decisions create problems, and those problems force further decisions.
When it comes to plotting a novel, this is the distinction I want writers to understand before they start drawing elaborate diagrams or downloading their seventeenth story-planning spreadsheet. I’ve found that once writers grasp this distinction, plotting becomes all about understanding why one event leads to another.
Let's get into it.
Start With a Problem
Consider this premise:
“A young woman discovers that she can communicate with the dead.”
Interesting? Potentially. But what happens next? She speaks to a few ghosts and spends the rest of the novel developing her paranormal customer-service skills? Maybe. Only you know. Either way, you will have to introduce a problem.
Consider this:
“A young woman discovers that she can communicate with the dead. When her murdered brother begins sending messages from beyond the grave, she realizes that the person responsible for his death is still hunting anyone who knows the truth.”
Now the story has somewhere to go.There’s a character with something at stake, a mystery to investigate, an opposing force, and a reason for events to escalate. You’re probably thinking this is obvious, but many beginner writers don’t spend enough time thinking about the problem. This gives us a useful starting point.
Now ask yourself four simple questions:
1. Who is the protagonist? Whose decisions will drive the story?
2. What do they want? What are they actively trying to achieve?
3. What’s stopping them? What conflict prevents them from getting it?
4. What happens if they fail? Why should readers care about the outcome?
The answers don’t need to be complicated. At least initially. Your protagonist might want to win a competition, escape an arranged marriage, find a missing sibling, or save their failing bookstore.
The important thing is that pursuing this goal creates conflict. A character who wants nothing has little reason to act. A character who wants something but can’t easily obtain it gives you a story.
Build Your Plot Around Decisions and Consequences
Here’s where truly many aspiring novelists get stuck. Pay close attention.
They know what they want to happen. Their protagonist meets a mysterious stranger. The stranger reveals a secret. Someone gets kidnapped. A hidden power awakens. An ancient evil returns.
All perfectly serviceable ingredients. But why do these events happen in this particular order?If you can rearrange your scenes without substantially changing the story, your plot may be a collection of episodes rather than a developing narrative. To avoid this, connect your major events through cause and effect. This is really important.
Let's imagine a fantasy protagonist who steals a forbidden map.
A weak sequence might look like this:
1. She steals the map.
2. She meets a traveling merchant.
3. She discovers a hidden temple.
4. She fights a monster.
I’m sure you can make these events entertaining, but their relationship is unclear.
A stronger sequence would look like this:
1. She steals the map because it reveals the location of a lost city.
2. The theft alerts the royal guard, forcing her to flee before she can study it properly.
3. She seeks help from a travelling merchant who claims to know the route.
4. The merchant betrays her, hoping to sell the map to the crown.
5. She escapes into the mountains and discovers that the map conceals a second route, one that leads somewhere the royal guard cannot follow.
Each event creates the conditions for the next. The protagonist’s decisions matter, and even her successes come with complications.
This is one of the most useful plot development techniques you can learn: make your characters responsible for moving the story forward, even when their decisions exacerbate everything.
In my experience, a useful way to test a sequence is to ask whether the next event happens because of the previous one, or merely after it. The distinction sounds small, but it changes entirely how a reader will experience your story.
Give Your Protagonist a Goal and a Reason to Change
I can't stress enough how important this is.
A compelling plot usually operates on two levels. The first is external: what the protagonist is trying to accomplish. The second is internal: what the protagonist must confront about themselves along the way.
These two dimensions don’t have to be equally prominent. A sprawling political fantasy might emphasize external conflict, while a literary novel might focus on a character’s changing understanding of their family.
Most stories, however, benefit from connecting the two. Imagine a detective determined to solve a series of disappearances. Her external goal is clear: identify the culprit and find the missing people. But suppose she also believes that trusting others is a weakness. She insists on working alone, withholds evidence from her colleagues, and repeatedly sabotages opportunities for cooperation.
Now her personal flaw actively interferes with her investigation. The external plot forces her to confront an internal problem. Her decisions become more difficult because solving the case requires something she has spent years avoiding.
I’d avoid treating character development as a compulsory redemption arc. A protagonist can become more ruthless or double down on a destructive belief. What matters is that the events of the story reveal something meaningful about who they are and what their choices cost.
This connection creates richer conflict than simply giving your detective a difficult case. It also gives the ending greater significance. Catching the culprit resolves the external problem. Learning to trust someone else can resolve the internal one. Two rewards for your readers.
Ask yourself: What does my protagonist believe at the beginning that the events of this story will challenge? The answer can become one of the forces shaping your entire novel.
How to Structure a Novel Without Making It Predictable
Once you have a protagonist, a goal, and a central conflict, you need to decide how the story develops.This is where a story structure guide becomes useful.
One of the most accessible approaches is the three-act structure. It provides a straightforward framework for introducing a problem, developing its consequences, and bringing the resulting conflict to a conclusion.
Act One: Establish the Problem
Introduce your protagonist, their existing circumstances, and the problem that disrupts them. In our detective example, this might be the discovery of a disappearance connected to a case she thought was closed.
The opening doesn’t need to explain the entire fictional universe. Readers can learn about the detective’s labyrinthine history and the mysterious symbol appearing at crime scenes later.
Act Two: Make Things Progressively More Difficult
The protagonist pursues their goal and encounters resistance. Maybe they discover that the problem is more complicated than expected. Early strategies stop working. New information changes the situation. Relationships become strained. Victories create unexpected consequences.
This is usually the longest part of the novel, and it’s where plotting requires the most thought. If the protagonist simply encounters a succession of unrelated obstacles, the middle can feel like an obstacle course designed by someone with a grudge.
Instead, make each development change the character’s options. The detective discovers that a colleague has been concealing evidence. Confronting them risks destroying an important alliance. Avoiding the confrontation allows the culprit to disappear. Either decision carries a cost.
The story becomes interesting because there is no easy way forward. I’d pay particular attention to the middle when outlining. It’s tempting to keep raising the stakes by introducing bigger threats or more villains. But sometimes a small discovery that invalidates the protagonist’s entire strategy creates more tension than an army appearing on the horizon.
Act Three: The Resolution
Eventually, the protagonist reaches a point where avoiding the central conflict is no longer possible. The final confrontation should grow out of the choices and discoveries that preceded it.
For example, your detective might finally discover the culprit, but solving the case requires exposing the colleague who helped her throughout the investigation. Now she must decide whether to protect someone she trusts or reveal the truth.
The three-act structure is a framework, not a set of compulsory milestones. You can introduce the central conflict immediately, delay a major revelation, use multiple protagonists, or tell the story out of chronological order.
The useful question you can ask yourself is whether the story develops in a way that feels coherent and earned. Learn more about how to master setup and payoff - a critical skill to writing satisfying stories.
A Plotting Template You Can Use
You don’t need an elaborate spreadsheet to begin planning. Start with a single page and answer the following questions.
- What is the story about?
- Who drives the story, and what do they want?
- What prevents them from getting it?
- What happens if they fail?
- What disrupts the protagonist’s existing life?
- What choice commits them to pursuing the goal?
- What makes the original problem harder to solve?
- What revelation or reversal changes the protagonist’s understanding of the situation?
- What difficult choice must they make before the climax?
- How does the protagonist confront the central conflict?
- What changes as a result?
If you’re a discovery writer who prefers exploring the story as you go, answer just the first four questions and start writing. You can plan the next section once you understand your characters better. If you prefer knowing where you’re heading, outline the major turning points and work backwards from the ending.
Neither method is inherently superior. Ultimately, you have to find out what works for you. And if your plot starts tying itself into knots, Jericho Writers has helped thousands of authors find their way through.
Practice Makes Better
Short stories are excellent for practicing plotting because they force you to build a complete narrative with limited space. You learn to connect events through cause and effect, establish stakes quickly, and deliver a satisfying resolution without padding.
Which is exactly why we host monthly flash fiction events where everyone’s welcome to give storytelling a whirl. Our first, Creepertober, is in full swing, with almost daily new stories popping up, and the next event is already lurking around the corner!
Plot the Story, Not Every Step
You can spend months planning a novel. You can outline every chapter, document every character’s motivation, and create a timeline so detailed that it could probably run a small government department, yet still discover halfway through that your story isn’t working. This is completely normal.
So my final recommendation is this: leave yourself room to discover things. Don’t predict every event. A plot provides the direction only. If your protagonist accidentally starts a civil war in chapter twelve that you didn’t predict, don’t panic. You might have just discovered a beautiful middle act.
To plot a novel, start with a central problem that forces your protagonist to act. Give them a clear goal, establish what stands in their way, and build a chain of decisions and consequences that changes the situation as the story progresses.
A compelling plot connects events through cause and effect. Each major event should result from a character’s choices, create new complications, or change what the character must do next. Strong plots also combine external conflict with internal stakes.
A useful plotting template should identify the protagonist’s goal, the central problem, the obstacles they face, the decisions they make, and the consequences of those decisions.
No. A three-act structure is just a useful framework. It helps writers organize a story around an initial situation, escalating conflict, and a resolution, but the exact structure can vary by genre and story.
