How to Plot a Novel with Index Cards: A Screenwriter's Trick

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Welcome to the Inside Creative Writing podcast, the weekly discussion of craft and technique for writers of fiction and creative nonfiction. And now here's your host, writer and educator, Brad Reed. Episode 42. Today, we're going to steal from the screenwriting world to hack our story plotting. We're going to explore a card game of sorts and figure out your story.

Introduction to Index Card Method

Let's get started. Welcome back to Inside Creative Writing, where we help you craft authentic, immersive stories one technique at a time. I'm your host, Brad Reed. And today I want to introduce you to one of my favorite tools borrowed or maybe stolen from screenwriting, the index card method.

Now, if you've studied screenwriting at all, you'll probably be familiar with this tried and true method of plotting and pacing a film. But if you haven't, this could revolutionize the way that you plan and plot your stories. So with a little tweaking, we can take it from the screenwriting world and make it work for novels and even short stories as well.

So this is one of those techniques that feels weirdly old school, which I kind of love. But trust me, it works. It's flexible, it's tactile, and it helps you see your story in a different way. And the best part, you don't have to be a plotter to use it. Even if you're more of a discovery writer, index cards can bring just enough structure to keep your novel from wandering off into the weeds. Before we dive in, though, I want to pause for a second, because if you're not yet sold on the idea that structure matters, you're not alone.

A lot of writers resist it. I used to resist structure, too. I thought structure would cage my creativity. What I've learned is that structure actually frees it.

So I've seen this play out in my creative writing classes over and over again. If I tell the students to write a story about anything they want, I get nothing but blank stares from them. They don't know where to start, right? There are just too many possibilities.

But if I give them limitations, they leap into storytelling. So something like write a scene where a character must leave a voicemail for someone they haven't spoken to in over a decade. They only have 60 seconds before the recording cuts off. They can't say why they're calling until the final sentence.

Now, notice how many rules there are to that or how much structure there is to that prompt. But what it does is it focuses the creative mind and it gets it moving, right? We start asking questions about that situation, about that prompt. It starts suggesting possibilities and even characters and types of conflict that we could write about because we've given it that structure.

So if you're on the fence about using structure in your writing, I highly recommend checking out a couple of past episodes of this podcast before or after this, listening to this one. So the first one is called How to Plot a Book, The Secret to Strong Story Structure. There'll be links for all of these at the show's website.

So that episode discusses something called Somebody Wanted But So and Somebody Needed But So frameworks for creating a focused, cause-effect-driven story structure. So check that one out. How to Plot a Book, The Secret to Strong Story Structure. You also might check out How to Plan a Book with the Snowflake Method.

So this is an interview with Randy Ingermanson about breaking a novel down into manageable planning steps. And then finally, maybe my favorite one in this topic is called Claymation in Story Structure. So it uses claymation as a metaphor to explain why underlying structure supports creative flexibility without limiting your expression.

So check those out. They're great, great podcasts, great episodes. If you still quite aren't sold on structure or want some different angles to kind of look at it from.

So check those out. They'll help you figure out your own approach. So let's get back into today's technique.

Understanding Screenwriting Structure

So what is the index card method? Let's talk first about how screenwriters actually use the index card method and why it's often based, for them at least, on a 40-card layout. So they start with 40 index cards.

Now, in the world of screenwriting, structure is everything. A typical screenplay runs about 100 to 110 pages long, and it follows a three-act structure almost religiously. To plan that structure, many writers use 40 index cards, and what they do is they lay them out in four rows of 10 cards each.

So the first row, the first 10 cards, is for act one. The second layer, the second row of 10 cards, is for act two, the beginning of the act two, to what we call the midpoint. The third row is for the midpoint to the end of act two. And then the last 10 cards are for act three.

So first row, act one. Second and third rows, act two with a midpoint in there. And then fourth row is your act three.

So here's how it breaks down. Let's look at act one, cards one through 10. So this we're looking at as the setup, basically, right? You're introducing the protagonist. You're introducing their world, their central problem.

So each one of these cards represents a scene, right? A major scene in that story that's introducing the protagonist. It's setting up the world they're in and kind of, you know, laying the foundation for what the story is going to need to really take off.

So somewhere around card eight or nine. Now, this is really flexible, but somewhere around card eight or nine, we hit what we call the first major turning point. And this is the moment where the story really begins and the protagonist commits to a new path.

So we've talked about this four as the inciting incident. It's not always specifically the inciting incident, but it often is. So let's look at some examples because that always helps, right?

So let's say we're looking at four rows of 10 cards each, and we're looking at the Hunger Games, right? So if we went to card eight or nine of the Hunger Games layout, we would see that that's about the time that Katniss volunteers as tribute, right? Up until that point, those first chords would be, you know, she's just kind of surviving. We're getting to know her in her world and setting up the conflict, right? The Hunger Games themselves, the conflict. And suddenly when she volunteers as tribute, she can't turn back, right?

She can't just go back to her normal life. So that's what kind of the first row of the Hunger Games would look like. Let's go ahead and look at Harry Potter, too. And I know there's lots of feels about Harry Potter and the writer of Harry Potter.

Now, I'm still using it as a source because it is such a shared story, right? So I'm not endorsing anything here. I'm just using it as a common story that we're all familiar with.

So let's look at Harry Potter. So the turning point in the first Harry Potter movie or book is when Harry boards the Hogwarts Express, right? Up until that moment, we are kind of just seeing his ordinary world. He's under the stairs, right? That's where his bedroom is. And he enters that magical world where the story really takes off.

And that would be about card eight or nine in that first row of the card system. You could go through and look at each of those scenes leading up to that and see how they're building up to that moment at card eight or nine, maybe 10, maybe five, right? It's flexible, but eight or nine is kind of that sweet spot that we're looking for.

So I think we're getting the idea there. I've got a couple of other examples here. If you're curious about or need some more help on it, shoot me an email, bradreidathe show's website, and I can send you some more examples of what those turning points look like, but very common in screenwriting and easy to do some research and find some examples on your own on Google, right?

Key Turning Points in Stories

So let's go ahead and look at act two now, right? So we have act one. We know that each card represents a scene in the story. Or in this case, we're still talking about film.

So a scene in the movie that builds up to the end of act one where something big happens, right? Some major change that really throws the story in a motion. Well, now we're into act two, right? The beginning of our second row of cards. This is the heart of the story. This is where we start to build tension.

In screenwriting, again, it's split into two halves, right? So we start to see the character work through this new conflict, this new world that they've thrown into, but we're building up to something called the midpoint, which happens at the end of that second row. And the midpoint fundamentally shifts the direction of the story. Maybe it's a big reveal. Maybe it's some kind of reversal, a sudden new goal, right? Something gets flipped on its head about midway through the story.

So when we first start planning these systems, we're really only concerned with figuring out those main turning points, right? We want to start by knowing what is my inciting incident? What is my midpoint? And then we'll get to the third and fourth ones here in just a moment.

But let's go back to the Hunger Games, right? So if we're looking at this row of 40 cards or this row of 10 cards, second row, at the end of that second row for the Hunger Games, we would see that Katniss scores a major win with her alliance and gains a moment of safety, right? There's almost like this false sense of control right in the middle where the reader goes, okay, we're going to make it, right? And then the game makers raise the stakes again, right? And the whole, it's like the rules of the game change. And I don't want to go too into detail.

If Turning point, it always feels like the third one to me because that midpoint is definitely a turning point, but you may hear it referred to as the second turning point or the second act, right, the end of the second act turning point. But this is where things fall apart, right? You will often hear this referred to in screenwriting as the all-is-lost moment. And I almost hesitate to teach people about this because it ruins a lot of movies. Once you know what you are aware of this plot point and are looking for it, you can see it so clearly in almost every film ever made. There's exceptions, of course, but that all-is-lost moment where everything has gone wrong, there's no way that the protagonist is going to succeed.

You know, we're done. So that happens at the end of act three. So in The Hunger Games, Rue dies, right? That moment, that scene where Rue dies, we see Katniss just emotionally break apart, right? Her illusion of staying morally separate from the games shatters. And it really changes Katniss from a survivor to a rebel, right?

But there's that moment before she decides to be a rebel that we think as the viewer, this is it, right? There's no way that Katniss is going to overcome this. All is lost.

Let's look at Harry Potter. So in Harry Potter, the all is lost moment comes with Harry, Ron, and Hermione. They go through the trap door and are separated from the teachers. Suddenly, they're on their own, right? The adults can't help anymore. They are facing what seems like an impossible challenge without backup.

Now, there are stronger all is lost moments in film than this one. But again, we're trying to share that story. So let me see if I can find one more here. Yeah, I'm going to leave it there. I'm looking through my other examples. And I think we get the sense of what that all is lost moment is here.

If you want to study the all is lost moment, all you have to do is watch movies. And watch for about three quarters of the way through. There's going to be a moment where everything is gone. In fact, one of my favorite one, I didn't even think of it until right now, so I'm kind of thinking off the top of my head here, is in Elf, right? Comedy movie. Does a comedy movie have an all is lost moment?

Absolutely, right? Almost every movie does. And that moment when Elf, right, when Will Ferrell is looking over the side of that bridge into the river, right, he's lost everything. He's lost his family. He's lost everything that he cared about. He's looking over the side of that bridge into the river, and we get the sense just for a moment, he might jump, right?

Elf is thinking about suicide in this moment, right? Now, the script doesn't say that or anything, you know, he doesn't say, oh, should I jump? But we get that feeling, oh, my gosh, all is lost here. What does he have left to live for? That is an excellent example of an all is lost moment in a comedy, right? They show up in all sorts of films.

So that's act three, right? I'm sorry, that's the end of act two. We reach that all is lost moment.

Applying the Method to Novels

So that would be the third card that we want to start with, right? We want to start with inciting event. We want to know our midpoint and we want to know what that all is lost moment looks like. And then finally, act three, or that final row of cards, is the resolution. It usually starts with some big change, right? Something unexpected happens or the rules change or something like that, right?

In Elf, we'll use that as an example. Suddenly Santa Claus comes down out of the sky, right? He sees Santa Claus in the sleigh and suddenly there's life again. There's hope again, right?

So act three starts with some kind of, oh, my gosh, maybe all isn't lost. Maybe, you know, this protagonist can confront their biggest challenge and still reach their resolution that we're hoping for. So the final 10 cards focuses on payoff, transformation, and ultimately closure.

So that last card of act three is how does this story end, right? How does this story resolve? So that's a little hard to do in audio format, but hopefully you're able to kind of picture what that looks like.

So to use the card system, you come up with those major turning points first. And I know I'm going this over again, but it's so important. The first row ends with the inciting incident.

The second row ends with the midpoint or what you can think of as a fundamental shift in the story. The last card in the third row ends with the all is lost moment. And the final card of the fourth row is the resolution. Once you know those, what you do is you kind of go back and backfill the other cards, those other scenes, to build up to each one of those points.

So why do they use 10 cards per row? So the reason that's so important is it helps you make sure that your pacing and your buildup is good, right? No part of the story feels rushed. No part of the story feels really slow and plodding, like it's going on plodding with a, you know, double D in there, not plotting.

So it just makes sure that the pacing is good, that each of these sections feel about right. Now, is there flexibility? Of course there is, right?

But at least you're aware of how you're pushing that expected structure, right? Oh, my first act here is pretty darn long, right? At least you're aware of that, so you can make some decisions about whether you're willing to take that risk of it being too long or whether it's time to cut that down a little bit.

So this is not about being rigid. It feels very rigid, right? But just like we talked about at the beginning, structure, some rigidity actually inspires creativity. It gives us problems to solve, and we have to come up with unique plots and unique characters to make things work. It always feels like putting together a puzzle to me, a puzzle where you don't have the box to look at.

So you don't even know what the picture is that you're trying to build. So this system is about knowing what needs to happen in each section of your story so you don't drift off or kind of lose steam. So when screenwriters are laying out these cards, they're writing scenes, right? They're thinking in bits of action, sometimes called beats, for how to build up to these main points. And each card focuses clarity.

So basically on each card, you're just writing a single sentence about what happens in that scene. So if a scene doesn't earn its place, it doesn't get a card, right? I have used this system for many stories that I've written, and it's one of the best ways I've found to get rid of the stuff that doesn't really matter, right? If you're putting something on a card and you're realizing, oh my gosh, am I really going to waste one of my 10 cards or whatever number I'm working with on this scene? No, right? Maybe that scene gets cut.

Maybe it gets combined with another scene. And I realize, oh, I can actually accomplish this in a single scene. Sometimes you'll find some scenes that need to be expanded. When you write it on the card, you're like, oh, that's like, it's not really a scene. That's like a, you know, a second of a dialogue or action. And I need to figure out how to expand this to make that pacing and the trajectory of the story work.

So that's basically how it works for screenwriters. Now, how does this work for novelists, right? For novelists, this level of focus is gold. Even if your book is 300 or 400 pages long, you can still use this approach to make sure that the major movements of your story are working together and that the pacing feels purposeful. Even if it takes a lot longer, it takes a lot more time to get to these points. The pacing is still going to be there.

So instead of jumping into just, you know, I'm going to write an 80,000 word novel and jumping into it kind of blind. You can start with a simple stack of cards, right? Each one summarizing a single scene or a turning point. The visual and tactile layout helps you understand your story at a glance. And what's really fun is that you can carry these cards around with you and work on your story in little moments almost everywhere, right? If you're chilling in a coffee shop, you can pull out your stack of cards.

You can play your card game, right? Put them out on the table in front of you, rearrange them, examine your story, brainstorm some linking scenes if you're still working on that. Mix them up and see if your story works in a different order. And really watch your story take shape in a hundred different ways that isn't, you know, rewriting pages and pages of text.

So this part of the process I love. It is so much fun to create this card system and just start playing with your story until that big picture clicks in and you have that aha moment like, There it is. There's my story, right? Even if it's a rough idea, now you have a roadmap for how to get there.

So how to set this up for a novel. So I always start with 40 to sometimes 60 blank index cards. Now you can do this digitally, but I find that paper, like real index cards work super effective for me. I punch holes in the corners of them so that I can put one of those ring, you know, those binder rings through it. And that way I can take them anywhere, undo that binder ring and lay them All the same kind of card.

But as you use it more and more, you're going to customize it for you and the way that your brain works and understands stories. You're going to make up your own rules for this card game. So basically what you do is you lay them out on a table. You pin them to a wall, something like that. And you start creating. The world is at your fingertips here.

Anything is possible. Right. Major changes can be invented, cut, rearranged in just a few movements of your hands rather than editing pages and pages of text that you've poured your soul into. In fact, when I start writing a new novel or a new story, I will just sit down with some index cards and write scene ideas out, right? Oh, it'd be cool if this happened. It'd be cool if this happened.

I don't care at that point. Are they turning points? Are they, you know, resolutions? It doesn't matter. I just get them on a card so that I can put them down on my table and start playing around with the story and seeing how to piece it together.

So what this does is it gives you a bird's eye view of your novel. It helps you immediately notice pacing issues, dead spots, missing scenes, right, where you really need to invent some more plot or places where one thread kind of disappears for too long, right? Now you don't need to end up with only 10 cards in a row like a screenwriter. That would be more like a novella, right, at that length.

But it's going to help you see if you've got an overloaded first act. You can see in a glance, right, even if you're using 15 cards per row, 20 cards per row, you're going to be able to see if you've got one row way bigger or way smaller than the other. That's going to be that warning sign, that red flag. Oh, I've got some work to do here on my plotting. And what's fun about that is that when you realize, oh, my second row is really short, it drives you into that new place of creativity where you're inventing new plot ideas that you never thought of that you could put in there, new conflicts, new directions, sometimes even new characters come to life and walk into your story because you realize I've got the space and the need here to flesh this story out some more. And a new character here would be great for that.

It goes right back to what we talked about earlier, that limitations drive creativity, right? That's an incredibly powerful concept to understand. So why does this work so well? It forces clarity and flexibility at the same time.

So it gives you clarity because if you can't summarize a scene in one sentence, that scene probably isn't doing enough, right? Joe goes to the store. That probably isn't a scene that needs to make it into the novel, right? Maybe we need to flesh that out.

But it's also flexible because they're so easy to shuffle around and change out, right? It's no work at all to throw away an index card, grab another one, and write a new scene idea on it and then play with that. You're not deleting 2,000 words. You're just moving a little index card around. And it helps with that pacing, right? It helps with cause and effect.

You can see how your scenes connect together. And you can see kind of the emotional rhythm of your story. Not just what happens, but how it feels. And I love the ability to lay my story out in these cards and read it with, scare quotes around it, like read my story in just a few minutes by walking through each of those beats or each of those scenes.

So what I've found is that this system is not only helpful for plotting and getting ready for a rough draft, but it actually helps me a lot when I'm drafting, right? My card system is basically my rough roadmap. Once I'm actually driving that road, things change, right? I get new ideas hit. That's no big deal. I add a new card.

I shift things around. I make sure that the story stays intact. Maybe I'm writing my midpoint and I hate it, right? It's just not working. I can stop at that point, write a new midpoint, and reshuffle some cards, create some new cards, and get my story back together.

Quotes on Structure

So let's look at some wise words today because structure is definitely talked about among many writers, right? Our first wise word today is from James Scott Bell. He's written such books as Plot and Structure, so he may know a lot about this thing. And he says, structure is not a prison, but the skeleton that gives shape and strength to your story. I love that. It's basically the concept that I used in the episode on claymation and how the armature of a claymation character can work as a great metaphor for the kind of structure that we're building into our story.

So structure is not a prison, but the skeleton that gives shape and strength to your story. I've also got one here from Stephen King. Now, Stephen King is famous for being kind of anti-structure. If you've ever read his book, I think it's just called On Writing, which is a fantastic book. He really hammers that idea of not starting with this great big plot, right? And maybe that's you, right?

Totally fine. But here's what Stephen King says about structure. I don't start with a plan, he says.

But once I have something down, I step back and look for structure. If it's not there, it doesn't work. Okay?

So even Stephen King, this well-known proponent of starting without a plan, says at some point, he stops and goes back and makes sure that he's kind of naturally put structure in there. And if it's not there, he rewrites it, right? He goes back in and lays that structure in.

So you can almost think of it like, you know, building a house as opposed to putting up a tent, right? So building a house, you're going to start with a plan. And even building it, you start with a foundation and you start with the basic skeletal structure of this house, and then you build it, right? Stephen King's approach is more like laying out a tent, right? If you've ever put up a great big tent, you basically lay it out flat. There's no structure to it.

You're just getting it out on the ground. And then you start putting the poles in and propping it up so that the thing stands and then has structure. It's kind of the way Stephen King approaches it, right? He just gets into writing, makes a mess on the page. And then he goes back to prop it up with the structure that it needs. And really either way works, right?

It's whatever system works best for you. So I love those quotes on structure. Now for our weekly challenge, it's going to be a little bit different, right? The challenge could be something as simple as start writing some cards for a story, right?

Weekly Writing Challenge

But what I want to do is build off our recent episode called Reading Like a Writer, where we were going to, you know, look at films, books, things like that, and how to really learn deep craft elements from reading those books. So what I would like you to do, and this would be a longer one to do, but it would be so powerful, is consider creating a set of cards for one of your example novels. One of those three or so novels that you go back to again and again to inspire your writing.

So go through that novel. You can do this with a film, too. Go through that novel and actually create the cards that would show this structure, right?

So for each scene, you're just going to write down, sometimes a scene is a chapter, right? But not always. Depends on how the writer's done it.

But for each scene or for each kind of unit of movement in that story, write it down on an index card. When you're done, lay that all out. Put it together. Does it show a three-act structure in there or maybe something else, right? And then notice how you see that novel differently now than you did before, once you really see that skeleton that's underneath it. If you do this, I would love for you to share that experience in the comments over at Inside Creative Writing.

You can just look up this podcast episode there and you'll see the comments at the bottom of that page. I'd love to talk about it over there. So if you're writing a novel and you feel stuck, overwhelmed, or just tired of re-reading the same scenes over and over without knowing where it's all going, try the index card method. Grab some index cards. They're cheap. Lay out your story and just give yourself permission to play.

If you're looking for more help on structuring your novel, definitely go back and listen to those episodes that I talked about earlier. They'll be linked over on the website. They're going to walk you through what story structure is really about and why it's so important, how you can use it even if you hate outlining. This method can be really, really fun. I hope you'll also check out the full How to Write a Novel guide over at the show's website. It walks you through every stage from the idea to draft to revision, the whole thing.

And I do want to plug one thing that I just built this week over on the website, and it is five-minute writing prompts. It's an automated kind of little program thing that you can find right on the website where you just click a button and it's going to randomly give you a five-minute writing prompt. Now, these are not the typical writing prompts that you see everywhere. These are really specific to the kind of work we do here at Inside Creative Writing. They lean into some of the concepts we've talked about in this episode, so they're not your usual writing prompts.

But it's a fantastic way to get the mind working.