What can I Use to Edit and Plan my Novella or Novel after I have a first draft ready?

Planning a novel can be a hard task, however you can make this easier on yourself by using certain basic tools, appropriate for all stages of your novel. This tool may be particularly useful if you have already completed a first draft and want to plan the way forwards through editing.

EDITING

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Chapter Plan and Summary

This is one of the most useful tools which I have used in recent months and honestly, I wish I'd started using it sooner. Creating a chapter by chapter plan helps to create an overarching plan of the whole novel.

How Do I create a Chapter Plan?

You can create a simple chapter plan with two columns. One with the chapter number or name, the other column, a summary of what occurs in the chapter. The chapter plan doesn't have to be perfect and no reader will ever see it.

You might be struggling with your novel right now. You might not have any idea where you're going or what your trying to say with it, but you didn’t come this far to give up.

woman looking at map while standing on road
woman looking at map while standing on road

A chapter and summary plan is like the road map to the end product. How you get there depends on how well you read the map.

What else can I do with a Chapter Plan?

If you can't persuade your friends, partners or loved ones to read your work, briefly talking through some of your chapter plan with them may help you to pin point what could be of interest to a reader, expand on ideas, and come up with new ones. You may also develop a feeling for what can be trimmed or edited out.

What Questions Should I Be Asking with A Chapter Plan?

For each chapter, you should be asking, does it create tension, explore a theme or character? If one or more of these answers is no, you may wish to reuse the best parts of a particular chapter to enhance one of the chapters that do work. If you've repeated the message of a prior chapter and a chapter adds nothing to the story, you may wish to cut it out all together.

If you're not sure if a chapter works, you may wish to examine the chapter with a very basic question: Does anything even occur in the chapter and has this been added to the chapter plan?

You can also use the chapter plan as a more general tool to help you out of any difficulties or ruts. What is missing and what direction do you feel it needs to go?