: How do you map out your storyline? There are various ways for mapping out the storyline that you will use for a story. One of them is to create a bullet-point outline, which would theoretically

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My favorite tool is Scrivener. It's full-featured writing software that organizes a larger manuscript as a set of documents, each representing a chunk of text.

Scrivener is great for plotting. You can view your chunks as index cards on a corkboard. Each index card shows the title and summary of a document.

I tend to chunk my manuscripts into scenes. I create create a document for each plot point/scene, view them on the corkboard, and drag the cards around around. This allows me to try out different sequences of action, notice plot holes, and generate new ideas from the juxtapositions.

You can also group documents into folders, view the folders as index cards, and drag those around on the corkboard. I use one folder per chapter.

Scrivener gives me exactly the kind of flexibility and organization I want. It used to be Mac only, but Literature and Latte has a beta version for Windows. Search for scrivenerforwindows.

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I still do this analog...plot points go on index cards, different plot lines are in different colors, cards get laid out on the carpet until I'm happy with the arrangement.

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One technique that I've used has been a simple spreadsheet. I make a number of columns, one for every major thread of the novel, and I color each column differently to make them stand out. Then I write a one-sentence summary of each scene and put it in the appropriate column, in chronological order from top to bottom, so that it looks like this:

X Y Z
*
*
*
*
* *

Imagine that X, Y, and Z are characters or subplots, and the asterisks are short scene summaries. In this outline, the action starts with X, moves to Y for two scenes, then to Z, then X and Z are in a scene together.

That way, I can read the chronological sequence of events by reading down all the columns, but I can also which threads aren't getting enough attention, and how the action moves from thread to thread.

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