I haven’t had a chance to work on the novel-in-planning in a couple weeks (trying to finish up a short story for deadline), but wanted to document my process as it evolves.

Here’s my old-fashioned “pens and paper and post-its” setup for planning my novel. Three sections, basically three acts, with fifteen or twenty scenes each. I’m not sure how I’ll work the chapter breaks at this point.

Eventually I’ll get more into color coding different kinds of scenes. For now I just have a bunch of yellow post-it notes with colored dots in the corner to show at a glance whose POV the scene’s in.

This isn’t completely finished, but close. My intention is to fully outline section one, loosely outline section two (leaving more room for adding or changing things based on “feel”) and leave section three pretty open. I see this as having the best qualities of the outline approach and the seat-of-the-pants approach.