Book Mapping for Writers
A novel is like a ball of string. It’s compact and fits in your hand, but if you want to unwind it to lay it out flat, you have a job ahead of you. You have to untangle and unwind, slowly and carefully. Your draft is a ball of character creations, setting details, and plot points that are woven together to create your story, so when you try to revise it feels like chaos—no clear starting or ending point. This is what makes developmental or story-level editing so difficult. One change could send the whole thing into a frenzied knot. It’s overwhelming, and to be honest, most writers decide to wipe out a couple of words, push some punctuation, and call revisions done. It makes sense. It’s hard.
But what if you had a tool to help? A book map to guide you. To allow you to follow those threads without untangling everything.
A book map allows you to more easily see what the ripple effect of a change will be and where that change needs to carry through. It is like lifting the layers of your story and being able to see each one individually. Cool, right?!
But the tangible benefits are that a book map can expose gaps in plot, character, and theme development. It can hint at areas where you can deepen your story or add more meaning or emotion. A book map can also help a writer more clearly see what is actually on the page. A sort of knowledge bias happens when you write day in and day out and pour a well-devised story onto the page. You know your characters and what happens inside and out. You’re part of the story. This is all amazing as you write, but as you edit, it can stand in the way of enhancing your story for the reader. Your brain tricks you into thinking all the information is there, on the page, but is it?
Maybe a piece of it is, but readers could translate it in other ways, which causes your climax to be hazy. Writers must ensure the readers have the critical puzzle pieces to snap together as they go, so they have a clear picture at the end. Otherwise, the meaning and message you set out to send them won’t hit home. Often I find writers are confident that each thing they intended is on the page, but realize some of the information could be clearer or delivered to the readers at a better time. The book map can help with this, among other things.
This tool can also help you visually see where you need more balance in your manuscript. Balance can be in the form of chapter lengths, or the balance of plot lines, or even tension. This is game-changing when you are revising. So many valuable insights can come from a tool like this if you learn to use it.
What Is a Book Map?
A book map is a condensed and structured account of the details a reader consumes in each chapter. It can take many forms but should be organized in a way that is easy to see gaps or areas of excess, allowing the writer (or editor) to analyze character arcs, conflict, pace, themes, and plot/subplot lines. I build my book maps in Excel because it feels more digestible to me. The table structure allows me to take a complex story and read one plot thread or character’s development at a time. That being said, I’ve seen book maps on long sheets of Kraft paper, poster boards, digital story maps in design programs or brainstorming software, or J.K. Rowling’s infamous one-pager for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. The form doesn't matter as much as the content and your ability to analyze what’s there and what’s not.
The book map can be used at each stage of the revision process and can continue to help you see where your story can grow and deepen as it continues to evolve. It can be used even before you submit your manuscript to a developmental editor, or it can help you self-edit at the story level if your budget doesn’t accommodate a professional.
What’s the Cost of a Book Map in Your Process?
A book map will cost you focus, time, energy—and maybe a little patience. It forces you to slow down. I know we live in a society that insists on us moving fast—and dammit, you might snap if Grandma asks one more time if your book is done. But it is worth the slowdown. The patience and the effort will pay off. Other than that, it’s free. If you can spend that time and energy, your book will benefit, and your readers will benefit.
Book Mapping Your Novel
Once you finish your first complete draft of your novel, follow the steps below to start to get the hang of book mapping. It can at times feel slow and like the benefits are foggy at best. Wait until the end. Map it all. Set out like a detective making notes and plotting evidence. Something magical happens when you transfer the meat of your story to another form. You see it in a new way.
Let’s get you started.
Set up the book map.
You can start from the template I included below and make it your own or create your own from scratch. Whatever suits you. Label the first column chapter. You can break up each chapter into multiple scenes or just capture details at the chapter level. This should reflect your book and organization. Sometimes I work at the chapter level except for the few chapters leading to the climax, which tend to have a lot of important details. Make this work for you. If you have acts or parts, refer to the template to see how I treat those. They are valuable to include in this view because you may find some chapters shift from act to act as you really revise and this keeps these divisions top of mind. To figure out the remaining columns, think about the important elements of your manuscript. This is about the elements of fiction and the characters and conflicts that lay at the crux of your story. Jot some ideas down until you’re sure you hit them and then label the rest of your column headers using those significant elements. Common column headers I use to track important elements in a book include:
Point of view—This is especially useful if you are using multiple or rotating POVs or omniscient. In omniscient or multiple POVs, you can track perspectives to see how balanced a view you offered the reader and if the perspective you offered matched the scene.
Timeline—This information gives you a great look at time passing, critical dates, and any inconsistencies, especially with non-linear timelines and flashbacks.
Setting or location—This column is not crucial but, like with characters, it can help to track details about where your story takes place for consistency and importance, especially in a story where the setting acts as almost a character in itself.
Main characters—Add a column for each major character, but really focus on the protagonist and antagonist. Focus on both the action and the emotional state and arc of your characters. This is also a great way to ensure your character trait details are consistent.
Main plot threads and subplots—This ensures that all plots are tied up at the end of a book and it helps weigh the balance of each subplot. It can show you where one subplot line is demanding too much attention or left without a mention for too long.
Themes—This column is really useful to track how hard you hit your themes home. You can add a note each time an action or mention reinforces your theme. You can also start to see if maybe you are trying to hammer too many themes into a storyline.
Summary—One to three sentences about what happened in the scene or chapter. I always add this as a reminder of what happens in that chapter at a glance; more on this below.
Words—This can be useful to see the balance of chapter lengths and if you felt there were pacing issues, this could help highlight long scenes or chapters that could be tightened.
Notes—I add this column to capture thoughts or feelings I had as I read. This is really important when you put yourself in your ideal reader’s shoes and experience the story as they would. For instance, if I thought the chapter felt slow or lacked a detail that might be needed or anything I wanted to think more about later. I also note questions that sprung in my mind as I read (even if you, as the writer, already know the answer). I usually put these in red or orange text to stand out to me.
Read your manuscript chapter by chapter, taking notes.
Hopefully, you have let your draft rest a bit and you’ve come back with fresh(ish) eyes and opinions. Try your best to put yourself in your ideal reader’s shoes. Experience your story the way they would. Suspend your criticism and your negative thoughts and try to enjoy the story you created. Any time you face a new detail that is critical to a character or their development, to the setting, or to the story overall, jot it down in the appropriate place on your book map. A good example might be a piece of backstory that reveals an inner wound for your protagonist that happened on her birthday. Maybe her father missed that day and it never really left her. Under the protagonist column in the book map, you could record that her father missed her birthday and at what age. You might also record her birth date. (These details can often expose age calculation errors, etc.). Continue to capture the details that stand out to you throughout the chapter.
Write a chapter summary.
Once you reach the end of the chapter, pause and reflect on the major things that the reader learned and that your characters experienced and summarize it in one to three sentences max. Not too detailed because your other columns and notes should have captured many of the intricate details that mattered. If not, look across the columns and see if you missed anything or maybe something you thought was obvious did not seem so in this read. Make a note either in the relevant column or in the notes column. Give yourself a second to really think about how the chapter progressed and how it made you feel. Make those notes as well. I like to keep track of if it was engaging and I wanted to keep reading or when it felt slow. I also make note of the open or lingering questions I had at the end of the chapter. Maybe a character said something that made me wonder if she was in love. Record that and see if you remember to pay off those details for your readers later. If not, it might be a great addition to ensure your readers’ satisfaction in the end. Be thoughtful in this read, but please—please—do not fill every box because you feel it’s better. It’s not. You will do yourself a disservice. For instance, imagine a narrative that has rotating third-person limited narrators. We’ll call them Carrie and Thad. Chapters one and two are from Carrie’s perspective, then we meet Thad. The rotation is random throughout the novel. Once you finish your book map, you notice Carrie hijacked the mic and we only see the story from her perspective for eight straight chapters. That could signal an area where you consider bouncing back to Thad, so the reader doesn’t lose interest in his storyline and to create the needed tension to keep readers dying to know what is up with Carrie. See what I mean? If you forced words in every space of your book map you would not see these natural patterns emerge. So for the love of everything that is holy, don’t do that. It won’t get you an A. Only record what you notice, but be aware when you are recording details you cannot find on the page. This knowledge bias is really the barrier that writers have in editing their own work. You must find it, or its insinuation, on the page to mark it on the book map. Otherwise, you might be fooling yourself, and your readers will not love you for it. So take your time on this read and be thoughtful about how you feel about each chapter and if what you know about your characters is actually reflected on the page in the way that you intended.
Repeat for each chapter.
Do it again and again until the end of your manuscript. Take your time. Once you reach “the end,” write any final notes and impressions you had. Did you feel like you stuck the landing? Was the ending what you wanted? Was there enough emotion in the climax? What’s missing? What feelings were present as you finished? Were they what you expected?
Now walk away. Let it rest just for a day or so and go celebrate another step in your journey.
Put Your Book Map to Work
Let’s be clear from the get-go. This map is not going to hit you over the head and tell you exactly what’s wrong. But if you analyze it and spend time with it, it will shed light on the areas you could improve in your manuscript. Analyzing a manuscript is a big job and takes a lot of practice. But there are some approaches that you can use to start identifying gaps or areas of opportunity. Remember analysis is about asking questions and digging deeper and the goal of book mapping is to end with a guide for your story-level revisions—a to-do list of sorts.
Start by finding a mechanism for collecting and organizing your conclusions and action items from your analysis. This could be a Google sheet or Excel doc, a to-do list app, Trello, Notion, or a good old-fashioned notebook. Pick your poison.
Then study your book map. Get a feel for it. Visually, are there giant gaps or groups of cells that are empty? Use your Sherlock skills and start digging into those. Do you see patterns? Ask yourself questions as you find those areas and see if there is something missing or if you leave the reader hanging for too long on a character or a plot line. Always ensure that you think about what a scene or chapter needs to provide for the reader to understand and get your intention, then pressure test that. Every scene should have a point in the story's arc, pushing the characters further and further to change and grow. If you are not sure that you succeeded, make a note of that scene and go spend some time with it. Dig and find what’s missing.
Use your notes column and your impressions of each chapter to look for themes. Did you comment a lot about a character not really expressing emotion? Or did someone talk too much? Did a theme feel overdone? Make those notes into actions on your to-do list. Next, try reading straight down a plot line column. Is it exciting? Are the stakes high enough? Does it feel like it builds tension in how it weaves with your subplots? Do the chapter breaks allow for maximum tension in your plot line, especially as you near the climax?
Read down the columns and see how it feels to isolate those story threads. Make your observations into actions and conclusions that can be added to your list of revisions.
Do the same for characters. When you read down your protagonist’s column, can you see their character arc developing? Does the reader learn more about them and see them challenged at each step of the way? Does your character show a substantial change of some sort by the end of the manuscript? If not, that is a great place to spend some time and find out how to better uncover a change in them, on the page, for the reader. Do the protagonist and antagonist push each other enough? Do they force the conflict? Could the stakes be higher between them? As you ask yourself these questions, you might start to have wild ideas of how this story can grow or deepen. Write those babies down.
Consider the theme, and how often you made specific notes or references throughout the book. Was it enough for the reader to understand your intention? Was it too much? Are there so many themes that they out-yell each other? You can also go row by row, scene by scene, to make sure each and every one of them (Yes, I said every one of them) shoves the character and the plot forward for the reader. This can help you identify and eliminate long tangents or side trips you took that might just give the reader an excuse to put the book down. We don’t want that. We want them turning pages until they are so tired they can barely keep their eyes open, so be ruthless in making sure that all the scenes are critical and have a purpose. This tends to be where the phrase “killing your darlings” really hits the fan.
This is not an exclusive list of what to check or how to use the book map, but it is a start. And if you put the work into mapping your book, you will find all sorts of opportunities and creative ways to deepen your story.
Now what’s stopping you? Go book map your novel. Only good things will come from it.
I’d love to hear your thoughts:
What part of this process did you find the most useful or the most difficult? What was your biggest “Aha!” moment once you book mapped your story? Leave me a comment, I’d love to know.
Good luck and happy editing!
For more tips and in-depth guides on revising your stories, check back for more posts. And look for my upcoming book mapping course for more on the process and benefits and an in-depth walkthrough to teach you the ins and outs of self-editing at a developmental level.
Need Help Book Mapping your manuscript?
Are you struggling with the analysis? Reach out and we can book a coaching package to look at it together. Or keep practicing and my book mapping for writers course will be out soon.