The plotting grid: what J.K. Rowling, Joseph Heller and William Faulkner knew about outlines

Some years after the Harry Potter series ended, a single sheet of lined paper covered in J.K. Rowling's handwriting started circulating online. It was her plan for part of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, and it looked nothing like the tidy Roman-numeral outlines taught in school. It was a grid: chapters numbered down the left side, and across the top, columns for each of the book's threads, including the prophecy, Harry's romantic life, Dumbledore's Army and the Order of the Phoenix itself.

Each row told you what happened in a chapter. Each column told you where a single storyline stood at every point in the book. It's one of the most useful images in the history of novel planning, because it shows that the most complicated popular novels of a generation were built on something almost embarrassingly simple.

A long tradition of grids

Rowling wasn't the first. Joseph Heller planned Catch-22, a novel whose chronology famously loops and scrambles, with a large hand-drawn chart tracking characters and events across time. Without it, keeping straight which of Yossarian's missions came before which revelation would have been nearly impossible, for Heller as much as the reader.

William Faulkner went further. When he was working on A Fable, he wrote the outline directly onto the plaster walls of his study at Rowan Oak, his home in Oxford, Mississippi, day by day across the week of the story. The writing is still there, preserved for visitors.

What these three very different writers share is a need to see a whole book at once. A written synopsis is linear; you read it top to bottom and hold the rest in your head. A grid lets your eye move in two directions: down through time, and across through threads.

How to build one

You need only two axes:

• Rows are units of time in the book: chapters, or if you haven't got chapters yet, rough sequence positions.
• Columns are threads: the main plot, each subplot, and optionally a column per major character or theme.

In each cell, write a few words about what that thread does in that chapter. If the thread doesn't appear, leave the cell empty. The empty cells are the most important part.

Reading the grid: five things it shows you

A finished grid is a diagnostic tool. Here's what to look for.

1. Vanishing threads

Scan down each column. If a subplot has a run of eight empty cells, readers will forget it exists, and when it returns it'll feel like an interruption. Either give it a small touch in the gap (a mention, a phone call, a glance) or accept that it's a smaller thread than you thought.

2. Overcrowded chapters

Scan across each row. A chapter where every column is full is often a chapter trying to do too much. Sometimes that's right, since climaxes are supposed to converge threads. But in the middle of a book it usually means the chapter needs splitting.

3. Threads that never touch

The best subplots collide with the main plot. If a column runs in parallel for the whole book and only interacts with the others in the final chapter, it's a separate story sharing a binding. Look for rows where two threads can meet and complicate each other.

4. Uneven rhythm

Look at the shape of the whole grid. Do all your subplots start in the first three chapters? That's a crowded, confusing opening. Do they all resolve in the last one? That's an ending crammed with bookkeeping. Staggering introductions and resolutions gives a book breathing room.

5. The midpoint

In a well-structured novel, something usually changes around the middle row. A secret comes out, a relationship flips, the goal shifts. If the middle of your grid looks like the rows on either side of it, your midpoint may be missing.

What goes in a column?

Rowling's columns were mostly plotlines, but you can grid anything that needs to stay consistent through a book:

• Characters, to track who's on stage (good for large casts).
• Mysteries and clues, to track what the reader knows.
• Timelines, if your book moves between past and present.
• Themes or motifs, if you want an image to recur at deliberate intervals.

Don't try all of these in one grid. Start with plotlines. Add a second grid later if you need one.

Paper, spreadsheet or board?

Rowling's was hand-drawn. Many writers use spreadsheets, which are easy to edit but cramped: cells don't grow gracefully, and moving a scene means cutting and pasting across rows. Wall charts and corkboards are wonderfully visible but hard to take anywhere.

Whatever the medium, the key features are the same: you need to see the whole book at once, and moving a scene should be cheap. If restructuring your outline is painful, you'll avoid doing it, and the whole point of planning is to make restructuring painless before it becomes expensive in the draft.

The grid pairs naturally with other methods. If your grid is getting crowded with multiple viewpoints, there's more on that. And if you'd like to fill each cell with a proper scene, the index card method is the next step down in resolution.

Two axes. A few words per cell. It was enough for Hogwarts.