the extreme plotter

OR how to outline your book like a screenwriter I guess??

Every so often, this writing alignment chart goes around on Instagram.

credit: @cheyannealepka

As a Dungeons & Dragons player, you know I LOVE an alignment chart¹. When I shared the grid most recently, I asked, “What does it say about me that I do… alllll the plotter things? Does that make me an extreme plotter??” A friend of mine who I went to film school with replied, “It says you started in screenwriting,” and honestly, yes, that’s exactly it.

People ask a lot about writing processes, and how things have changed for me coming from screenwriting. Well, I hate to disappoint, but it’s exactly the same. I’m a plotter because that’s how I was brought up. In television, there are a lot of steps that are necessary to get an episode approved, by the showrunner, and then by the studio/network². I was in a creative writing for the media program in college, and then worked in TV writers’ rooms for a decade, so this process is all I know.

When I worked on my first narrative TV show, Hulu’s Casual, Liz Tigelaar ran the writers’ room. She always started us off breaking the emotional arcs of the characters, so that’s where I begin as well. I saw an AMA Emily Henry did on Instagram a million years ago where she said she always thinks about what her characters would be in therapy for. That’s stuck with me as well. When I’m first toying with a story, it’s all what does the character want? What do they need, both externally and internally? What is their secret? What should they be in therapy for? I also do a little thinking about their background, family, job, etc but I don’t write a whole character bio.

Next, I start building a scene bank. I list out bullet points in any order for all the scenes I’ve been thinking about. This is usually cobbled together in combination with a running list in my Notes app. Sometimes there are five, sometimes there are twenty. Sometimes it just says “cinnamon roll has a VERY dirty mouth” (iykyk).

The original scene bank for NTWDT—there were only two other scenes here before I started my next step. No, I don’t know why she was flying for Thanksgiving when the story always took place during Hanukkah but overall, these scenes stuck

After I’ve exhausted my immediate ideas for the scene bank, I start to card my story. Sometimes I’ll do colored notecards for different plot lines (like pink for the romantic story, green for the work subplot), and sometimes I’ll forget that I need to buy colored notecards and I’ll just scribble on the side with different colored markers instead. I just put a sentence or two on each card so I have a general sense of the scene. And then I grab my gigantic cork board, and I start to lay out the story. Generally, I have space laid out for 40-48 cards total, four columns of 10-12. That’s act 1, 2A, 2B, 3.

A board of one of my books

My advice to writers is always that reading in your genre is just as valuable as any craft book. At this point, I can generally feel on instinct where certain beats should fall. So I lay those out roughly where they go, and then fill in the blanks as best as I can. There are often many, many holes. But don’t worry, we still have more steps to go in my convoluted process!!!

Once I have my board, then I start writing my outline. Yes, we did allllll that and we still didn’t write the damn outline yet. Apologies. This is why the critique partners of mine who are pantsers think I’m out of my mind. But anyway, now that I have a rough idea of the structure, I write a 20-30 page outline. It’s pretty detailed, with lines of dialogue, notes to self, etc.

The original opening of my outline back when this was still a feature screenplay. This scene doesn’t exist in the book at all, but look, it’s hard to find non-spoilery things to share here as examples! (but also lol at “something more clever”)

I know a lot of plantsers and panters don’t like outlines because they feel like they lose the magic of discovery, but even after alllllll that, would you believe that’s not the case for me? Things change all the time for me once I’m actually drafting. The scene where Norah and Henry first kiss was supposed to be an almost-kiss that got interrupted, but the characters had other ideas for how they were going to spend that morning and instead go a whooooole lot further than I originally planned. I remember being in high school while drafting one of my “manuscripts,” and calling my best friend (who was also a writer) to complain about how my characters weren’t doing what I told them to do. I thought I was losing it. In retrospect, this is just being a writer. It happens to me all the damn time, characters actively dismissing what I want them to do. I know I made them up and I’m *technically* in charge but still!! It’s wild!

I’ve used this process for three books now³, and every time, regardless of how plotted out things are, I’ve always had to re-break the third act. So yes, it’s a lot of work on the front end, but looking back at these materials now, the structure of NTWDT honestly didn’t change that much, despite rewriting about 30% of the book. Some emotional pieces, backstory, and scenes changed, sure, but the overall structure remained pretty much intact.

So all of this to say, I guess, you can be a plotter and still hold onto that magic.

Apologies, I’ve been rambling for a while now, but I do want to touch briefly on revisions as well. I got this template from an AMA that the wonderful Jasmine Guillory did about her own process, and it’s helped me so much! I do a few words about what the scene is, the POV for each character (even if it’s a single POV book like NTWDT is, this has helped me track all the characters’ emotional arcs in a big way), and which changes I need to make for the next draft.

Revision table for the second draft of NTWDT

But also sometimes I leave myself little notes like this for funsies because revising is so hard!!! And this is already too long so I’ll just leave you with this.

A few select POVs from throughout the book

Oh, but one last teaser if you’ve made it this far—in NTWDT updates, I have seen a cover sketch and HOLY MOTHERFORKING SHIRTBALLS it is so good I honestly can’t believe it. Somehow my ACTUAL DREAM ARTIST is doing my cover, and has already brought the image I had in my head to life better than I could have hoped. And that was just the initial sketch! I cannot WAIT to be able to share this with you.

What I’m reading

The 2026 Romance Debut class has been doing some traveling physical ARCs, and I’m having a blast reading these and leaving little notes/screams/hearts/my personal rendition of the EYES emoji in the margins. Natalie Messier’s EVERY VERSION OF YOU was such a delight that my husband actually had to take the book away from me because I was too excited to go to sleep. Jordyn Taylor’s SEE YOU AT THE SUMMIT was similarly fantastic and there was one scene that made me weep so much I was fully not OK—my favorite personal reaction to a book! Check out these two great books coming your way SO SOON because OMFG it’s December and 2026 is less than a month away?!?!?!

More soon!

xo R

1. Personally, I looooove playing chaotic characters—my favorite being a moon elf artificer who I modeled after Cher from Clueless, if she was also a little trigger-happy valley girl

2. In the narrative writers’ rooms I’ve been in, we’ll break an episode in parts: first, we’ll figure out each character’s storyline for the episode, then break that down into beats. After each storyline has its beats, we’ll blend them together to see where the episode will shift between stories throughout the episode. These steps are usually called boarding or carding the episode—it will literally be puzzle pieced together with each scene on a notecard (physical or digital). Once the episode board is complete, the assigned writer will create an outline based on the board. The showrunner will revise the outline, and often the studio/network will need to see it as well and give notes. These outlines are usually quite long and detailed, with sample dialogue sprinkled throughout. Once the outline is approved by all parties, the writer will be sent off to draft while the rest of the room breaks the next episode. Lather, rinse, repeat.

3. NTWDT, the second book in my Berkley contract, and a third that hopefully I’ll be able to sell because I love them so damn much!!!