Plot Outline Template

What a plot is

A plot is a chain of events in which each one causes the next. E. M. Forster made the point in a famous example: the king died and then the queen died is a sequence; the king died and then the queen died of grief is a plot. This template asks you to fill in the links of that chain, in the order of the classic dramatic arc. The six stages are exposition, the inciting incident, rising action, climax, falling action and resolution. The German writer Gustav Freytag laid them out as a pyramid in the nineteenth century, and the shape has survived because it matches how readers feel a story build, break and settle.

Cause and effect between the boxes

The test for a plot outline is the words between the boxes. If you can join each box to the next with and then, you have a list of events, and the story may feel episodic. If you can join them with therefore or but, you have a plot: the inciting incident therefore sends the hero to make a plan, but the plan produces a complication, therefore the hero has to change course. Read down the boxes after you fill them in and mark each join. Where you can only say and then, there is a gap to fill.

Rising action, climax and falling action

Rising action is the longest stage and the one that most often goes flat. It needs at least three movements, and they must escalate: a first attempt, a complication that makes the goal more costly, and a turn that changes what the hero understands. Each should force a harder choice than the last. The climax is the moment of the hero's final choice, and it should use something the story has taught them. Falling action is short: it shows the immediate consequences and loosens the tension. The resolution shows the new normal.

The climax should be hard to predict but easy to believe afterwards. If readers could have guessed it from the first chapter, the story has not made them work, and if nothing in the first half prepares it, the ending will feel like luck.

Stakes and subplots

Put the stakes in writing near the top. Stakes are what the hero loses by failing, and the more specific they are, the more the reader cares: sixty jobs and the town's last independent paper are more concrete than the truth. A subplot is a second chain that crosses the first at least once, ideally at the turn or the climax, so that it adds meaning instead of length. If a subplot never touches the main plot, it is probably a different story.