From Idea to Story: A Writer’s Workflow for Planning Fiction
A good idea is not a story. Story planning is what turns a flash of inspiration into something you can actually draft. This is the fiction-writing workflow I use to move from that momentary flash to a story plan, a timeline, and a chapter plan.
Turning inspiration into a workable story is like climbing and descending a hill of chaos. When you start, you’re at the base, with the beginnings of a story. Is it a short story, or a novel, or nothing at all? Let’s assume it’s worth investigating.
Time to climb. Expand and unpack the idea, and suddenly, you have characters, plot points, locations: all of that. You’ve got lots to work on, but it’s chaotic. You’re at the top of the hill, or maybe mountain.
Now you have to bring order to the chaos. You have to establish a chain of events. Discard and cut, group together, and improve. You’re editing.
As the storyline establishes itself, the level of chaos drops, and you descend the hill. Finally, you’ve found a level you’re happy with, and you’re on the other side.
MOUSE
I created MOUSE to help with this process. This is a browser-based outliner app that I developed using ChatGPT and Gemini. It’s free, no ads, and I don’t track anyone.
Using MOUSE, you can treat a Markdown document like an outline. Here’s how I get over that hill. My workflow creates three outline documents.
* The Story Plan
* The Timeline
* The Chapter Plan
The Story Plan
This is a “living document.” That means it changes a lot! This is my first dump of everything I know about an idea. It starts with a summary of the idea, normally a single paragraph.
For example: Alex the squirrel wants to be human, and has decided it’s possible if she eats magic hazelnuts. She searches for magic hazelnut trees and almost gets run over by a careless driver. She realises that being human isn’t so great, and sticks with normal hazelnuts. Obviously, a bestseller.
At that point, I list characters, noting any quirks, character flaws, ambitions etc. Each character’s story arc follows, made up of scenes.
The Timeline
If you want a story to make sense, there has to be an underlying timeline. The characters’ individual arcs need to be woven together: consolidated. To get this done, you may need to add phases. Break the story into parts. Character arcs will intertwine these components.
The story doesn’t have to follow that timeline, but it will form the foundation. You might decide to jump about the timeline. That seems to happen frequently in modern TV drama. Think of the Amazon Prime TV adaptation of the Scarpetta novels. This is based on Patricia Cornwell’s books about the career of a forensic pathologist. The TV adaptation conflates several books, so the series jumps back and forth in time, but there is a unifying timeline. By the way, too much jumping around for my taste!
It’s at this point a tool like MOUSE is handy because you don’t have to separate your Markdown document from the outline. They can be the same.
In my example, I might add these layers (story arcs):
1 Discovery of hazelnut powers.
1.1 Stumbles into a garden.
1.2 Talks to garden nymphs.
2 The search for magic trees.
2.1 Finding the map
2.2 Finding a compass.
3 The accident.
4 Lesson learned.
These phases need not make it into the final story, though it’s possible. They are there to help you bring structure.
But this hierarchy that helps you bring structure and order is a liability if it’s explicitly made part of a story. Imagine if the Lord of the Rings had headings and subheadings! People are used to reading chapters, so the hierarchy needs to be flattened.
The Chapter Plan
This document takes me beyond the timeline into constructing the actual book. I need a sequence of chapters that represents a narrative. The narrative is my take on events, and one sequence of events can support many narratives.
In my bizarre squirrel story, I could gloss over consultations with the garden nymphs, making the squirrel seem reckless. Then I could have a flashback to the nymph scene after the accident to drive home how dumb the squirrel was. Do I want to tell a salutary tale about listening to people?
Alternatively, I could spend lots of time on the talks with the nymphs, but show the squirrel spending too much time searching the map and compass. The squirrel gets so lost in the detail of the search, she gets distracted. Am I telling a tale about losing perspective?
Allocate chapters to create your chosen narrative. Map your timeline and character arcs to chapters. If you get confused and don’t know where to go next, refer to the timeline.
It might be helpful to divide a story into parts. These could be substories. Part 1 of my squirrel epic could be life with the nymphs. Part 2 could be about the search for the map and compass. Part 3 is about the tragic conclusion.
If you have the time and mental energy, it’s worth exploring several narratives. If you use MOUSE, you’ll find it easy to move chapters around and copy from the timeline document. I found it too difficult to do using a document by itself.
Go Write…
Having done all that, I can now go and just write. Creating those documents maps out the story in my head. I don’t have to adhere to it strictly, but it’s my guide. It means I know what to write next. That’s more valuable than you might think. So, are you going to let that brilliant idea flutter away, or are you going to get ready to write?