I use a plot grid to outline every single one of my books, and I find it the most helpful outlining tool I have ever used. I've written seven books in the past four years, and I've used a plot grid to outline and revise every single one of those books. In this video, I'm going to explain to you exactly what a plot grid is, how I fill them out, how I use them differently in the drafting versus the revision process, and then I'm going to share with you the template that I use in this video so that you can fill it out and use the same one that I do. So, first, what is a plot grid? A plot grid is a type of outline for a book that is created using a grid. I learned about it when reading an article about how JK Rowling outlined the Harry Potter books. she would write her plot grids by hand. I like to write plot grids on the computer because I just find it easier and I can shuffle things around more. A plot grid exists on a grid and the way that it works is every single column of the grid corresponds to a different plot or subplot of your story and every single row corresponds to a chapter or scene. This is what JK Rowling's plot grid looks like. This is a snippet from I believe the Order of the Phoenix. And I know it looks kind of overwhelming when you look at it all at once if you've never seen it before, but this is how it's broken down. So if you're looking right at the top at the labels of every single column, you'll see that there's the first one is number. So that corresponds to the chapter number. The time, so that's like the time of year that the scene or chapter occurs. The title because each of these uh titles correspond to a chapter. the plot, which is just a very short summary of what the scene or chapter is going to be about, and then all of these other ones. So, Prophecy, uh, Cho/Jinny, the DA, the Order of the Phoenix, Snape/ Harry and Father, I believe that reads, and Hagrid and Gro. All of those are subplots, and each of them gets assigned to their own corresponding column. But then in every row like in the first row you have 13 under number, time is October, the chapter title, the general plot and then a note under every single subplot column tracking how that subplot develops over the course of the story. By creating these columns for every subplot, you're able to easily track how every subplot develops over the course of your novel. If you're revising and let's say you just want to focus on the Cho and Jinny subplot of the book, you're able to isolate very quickly all of the different things that happen under that subplot by just looking at that column. And then you can see if a bunch of squares are empty, if you know they jump from one thing to the next thing very suddenly, you can kind of see the gaps in each of your subplots more clearly. This JK Rowling one is just a snippet of what would be her entire plot grid for the book. I make plot grids and track every single chapter of my novel from beginning to end, both before I start writing a book and after I've written a draft to determine what revisions I want to make. I make my plot grids on the computer, usually in Google Sheets or Excel. So, this is an example of a plot grid that I made last year for a book that I was writing. I'm not even going to say spoilers because this book is very different now than it was when I first started writing it. And also, I have no plans on publishing it now. I'm going to query it out this year and see where that takes. So, I really don't care if you see what happens throughout this book. This is what my plot grid looked like for my first draft of this book. You see on the top line I have one column corresponding to chapter, one to plot point, one to time, one to the physical layer which is basically just my plot, one to my invisible layer which is like the general theme I was envisioning for the book and then all of these are subplots throughout the story. So I was just kind of coming up with my general ideas for draft one. I don't know why it's not filled in right now. the plot point I usually put in like if I'm using hero's journey or something I will put in the steps of the hero's journey. Yeah. So here right now we have like fake climax the climax and usually this will be a little more filled out. Uh this one's not completely filled out so I think I just got too excited and just kind of jumped into writing this draft before I was totally done with it. But this was my little the summary of each plot point in the physical layer. And then as you can see during like with the subplots, I kind of put the general subplots I thought would fit in well to the story up here and then just filled in stuff that I had ideas for. My plot grids used to be extremely detailed. For example, this is a book that I wrote like 3 years ago. I had a very detailed plot grid for this. My physical layer column was really detailed and all of my plot points you see are like pretty well fleshed out in there. So, the way that I use a plot grid is different when I'm writing versus when I'm revising. I used to fill them out in serious detail. Back when I was first kind of still learning how to write, and I am obviously still learning how to write. Like, I'm never going to be done learning how to write, but I have a better handle on things now and feel more confident in my intrinsic abilities to make decisions on the fly. And I was not that confident in that a couple years ago. So, my pluckers from a couple years ago were a lot more fleshed out than they are now. And what I like to do is create a plot grid and brain dump all of my ideas for the book into that plot grid. I like to start with a story structure like the hero's journey. The hero's journey is honestly my favorite one and that's the one that I use the most. I make sure that I hit every plot point in the hero's journey and can put a bunch of ideas that I have for different scenes into the plot grid. So there are going to be a lot of gaps in it. It's not going to be fully fleshed out and completed. Not every column is going to get hit every single chapter because I like to do a lot of exploring in my draft one. But once I have a draft one, I find it very helpful to go back and retroactively create a plot grid based on everything that I wrote in that draft one. This allows me to get a really good bird's eye view of the novel and figure out how things are working and how things may not be working. It also forces me to put all of the little marks of my subplots into columns. And sometimes I'll find that when I do this, I'll realize that I thought that I was really fleshing out a subplot, but actually there were a lot of gaps in it. Like if there was a budding romance between two side characters that I wanted to show, I might have kind of forgotten about them during some scenes and then they came back in some scenes and maybe they were like just kind of looking at each other at the beginning and then all of a sudden they're like holding hands and stuff in the background a couple scenes later and there's a lot of missed opportunity for ways I could subtly develop that and so that helps me open my eyes to things like that. So, for example, with this book that I wrote last year, I went and I created a plot grid for draft two, but it was not a totally perfect like draft one and draft two because I didn't quite finish the end and I didn't write the ending and I got kind of confused and bogged down by what I wanted the book to be. So, I kind of went back to the beginning and wrote everything that I had and moved things around to try to do like take two of the same idea. So, this is what my plot grid looked like for draft two. I honed in on my invisible layer. I figured out Will's character arc more or I figured out what I wanted him kind of to be. I also realized that like there were some clues that I wanted to drop in about certain characters or like a big reveal to foreshadow a reveal. I added in a layer of like the main character having friends from New York City and I just wanted to track how much she mentions them and how her feelings about them change over the course of the book. In all of my physical layers, I note the cliffhanger at the end just to understand how each scene pushes into the next. And then when I went on to go do draft three, I created this by writing down everything that I had. And then I used it almost as like another draft of the book by brainstorming ways that I wanted things to play out and putting all of that into this outline. This book was quite challenging. Like the most recent book that I wrote, I wrote an outline, I wrote the draft, I got all the way to the end, everything held together and it was such a cool feeling. This book, I wrote the outline, I wrote the draft, I got halfway through, I realized I didn't like it or I came up with a better idea for something, I'd start over, I'd create a new plot grid, I'd try again, and then that kind of was still bad. So, I went back to the beginning and I tried again. And it's been this cycle of like chipping away at it, trying to get happy with it. And I'm still working on it. Still not totally happy with it. So, every single book is different, but this is a tool that you can use when you feel bogged down by just how overwhelming a manuscript is because it allows you to take a step back from it and get a bird's eye view of what is happening in your manuscript. And it allows you to make a plan for how you can fix things and better see what holes there are in your manuscript. I created a template already writing down all the things that you need to keep track of when creating a plot grid. I made it in Excel and I will walk you through what it looks like right now. The different columns that I created are plot point so you can track the plot point, your chapter number, the time, so you can keep track of your timeline, the POV if you're writing in first person, your plot, your major theme, and then your subplots. You can add as many of these as you want, and then your character arcs. And you can add as many of these as you want. I created a couple different tabs. So, if you wanted to do the hero's journey and create a plot grid based on the hero's journey, I already filled in the plot points here. You can delete rows if you want to. You can add them. This is just a starting point and kind of gives you a form that you can fill out. I did the same for my basic story structure. So, I have these five plot points I always like to start with. And so, I made one for that with the point of entry, the inciting incident, the midpoint, the climax, and the resolution. And then, I also made one for the three-act structure. I was hoping that having this would make it a little bit easier for you to just go in and fill it out. That way, you don't have to create the spreadsheet yourself. And obviously, you can change it. You can update it based on what you think works for you. My goal here is just to share with you what is working for me, just to give you a launching point so you can experiment with this and see if it's something that resonates with you. Not everybody is going to be a plotter like I am. Some people are going to prefer a more relaxed approach to writing and a more discovery focused approach, and that is totally fine. This might not work for you if you are more of a pancer, but I am becoming a little bit more of a pler. Like I like to have a rough plan going into a manuscript and I always like to have an outline because if I don't have an outline, I just get overwhelmed and things don't feel right. But if I get too detailed, it bogs down my creativity and my motivation. So I like to have a balance between those things. I'm going to put this in a Google sheet. So if you would like to download it and copy it onto your own account and use it, please feel free to do so. I have linked that in the description of this video. But that is all I have for you for this brief introduction to plot grids. I hope that this was helpful to you. If it was, I'd be super grateful if you could like this video and subscribe to my channel. My name is Claire Freys and I'm an award-winning author who makes videos on this channel sharing actionable writing tips that helped me make my own writing better. I'm the author of the five book paranormal thriller They Stay series, which is complete and all published now. Have you used a plot grid to outline your books before? If you have, let me know down in the comments how you have used it and if your columns differ from mine. People like to keep track of different things and so this is just what works for me, but I would love to hear if there are other things that work better for you. I hope you have a fantastic week everyone and as always, happy writing. [Music]