How to plan a chapter on one page

There is an entire industry built on the idea that your draft is stuck because your notes are badly organised. Occasionally that is true. Far more often the chapter is stuck because you have not decided what it is for — and no amount of colour-coded cards will decide that on your behalf.

So here is the smallest tool that actually works: one page, six lines, ten minutes. It fits on the back of an envelope, it survives being lost, and it can be redone from memory in the time it takes a kettle to boil.

The six lines

1. Who wants what, right now. Not what they want in the novel — what they want in this chapter, in the next few hours of story time. "Finish the conversation without crying." "Get out of the house before his brother wakes up." Small and immediate. If the answer is "to be happy", you have written a theme, not a want.

2. What is in the way. Another person, a rule, a lack of time, their own refusal to say the thing. One obstacle is enough. Chapters with no obstacle read as transport: the character travels from the last important moment to the next one.

3. Where and when. One line. A kitchen at 2am is a different chapter from the same conversation in a car at noon, and choosing deliberately saves you from the default of two voices in a white room.

4. What is different at the end. The single most useful line on the page. Something must not be as it was: a decision taken, a relationship cooled, a piece of information moved from one head to another. "They argued" is not a change. "She stopped asking" is.

5. What the reader now knows that they did not before. This is a separate question from line four, and keeping them separate catches a specific failure: chapters where a great deal happens to the characters and nothing at all happens to the reader.

6. The last line, roughly. You do not have to write it well yet. You have to know whether you are ending on a closed door, an unanswered question, or a quiet landing. Deciding this before you start is the difference between a chapter that ends and a chapter that runs out.

Filling it in

Write the six answers in short sentences. Do not neaten them. If a line will not come, that is information: usually it means lines one and four are the same thing, which is how you discover that two chapters are really one. Fuse them and the page gets easier.

Keep all the pages in one place — a notebook, a single document, a folder of photos of envelopes. After twenty chapters the stack becomes a reading of your own book, because the line-four answers in order are your plot, stripped of prose. That is also the cheapest version of the record described in how to keep a series bible.

None of this makes you an outliner. You can fill the page in five minutes before writing, or after writing, as a diagnostic. If you work without a plan at all, the page used afterwards is still useful and does not touch your process; the broader trade-off is in outlining versus writing without a plan.

The pass before you publish

Once the chapter is drafted, read it against the page and ask three questions, in this order.

Does it do what line four says? Not approximately — actually. If the change you promised yourself is not on the page, it is still in your head, which is the most common reason a chapter feels fine to write and flat to read.

Where would a reader stop? Find the paragraph where attention would drift, and be honest; it is usually a run of description or a conversation that has already made its point twice. Cut from there to the next thing that happens. Most chapters improve by losing their third quarter.

Does the first page earn the second? Beginnings carry more weight than their length suggests, which is why opening lines that lose readers is worth a read on its own.

Then stop. Three passes is a checklist; eight passes is avoidance. For the deeper revision work that comes later, see how to edit your own writing.

Two things the page will not fix

It will not tell you how long the chapter should be — that depends on where you are publishing and how, and is argued out in how long should a chapter be. And it will not name the chapter for you, which is a separate small craft of its own: how to name your chapters.

Why this matters more when you publish serially

With a finished manuscript you can fix a weak chapter before anyone sees it. Publishing chapter by chapter removes that safety net: the chapter goes out, and the next one has to follow it. A one-page plan is cheap enough to do every single time, which is exactly what that rhythm needs — and it pairs with the first-chapter pressure described in how to write your first chapter.

We make Arwy, an Android app where you can publish a book chapter by chapter and readers comment as they go, so you find out quickly whether line four landed. It is not a planning tool and we are not pretending otherwise: if you want a corkboard, scene cards and a structural view of a whole novel, use dedicated writing software and bring the finished chapters here. There is also no iOS version yet.

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