The Notecard Method of Plotting a Book

What do Michael Crichton and Vladimir Nabokov have in common?

They both used notecards to plot their novels.

Michael Crichton jotted down ideas and snippets of dialogue on index cards as he went about his day, eventually arranging and rearranging them until he had a skeleton of a novel. Vladimir Nabokov filled notecards with paragraphs of prose and notes to himself, drafting much of his novels on the 3x5 rectangles.

That’s the beauty of the notecard method: whatever works for you and your individual writing process goes!

So, what is it, exactly? Well, it’s mostly what it sounds like – putting together the plot of your novel with notecards – but there are three variants that most people fall into. Those are:

The Michael Crichton variant, where you write down everything you know about your story on notecards instead of in a notebook, and then place the cards in order. (For more on this, see my post explaining it in detail here[1])

The Detailed Outline variant, where you use a structure guide, such as the Save the Cat! beat sheet or the twelve-step Hero’s Journey, to fill out your notecards. If you want to learn how to do this, check out my posts Using Save the Cat! to Plot With Notecards[2] and Using the Hero’s Journey with the Notecard Method[3].

And the “Index Card Method and Story Structure Grid” variant, developed by Alexandra Sokoloff (check out her post describing it here). It is similar to the Crichton method, only it offers more structural guidelines. This makes it a good starting off point for writers on the begging of their author journeys. If you start off with the “Index Card Method and Story Structure Grid,” but find you want more structure, you can try incorporating the Detailed Outline variant of the Notecard Method. Conversely, if you find you need less structure, you can easily switch to the Michael Crichton variant of the Notecard Method!

But regardless of which variant you chose, some writers give each significant scene (or the ones they know about at this stage of plotting) its own notecard, and then arrange them in order. Others break down their stories by beats, and write those down on notecards. Still others use notecards to outline a skeletal plot using the most important “moments” they want to hit (such as the inciting incident, the end of act 1, or the climax), and then fill in the space under those header-notecards with character-notecards, scene-notecards, and snippets of dialogue, etc.

And some writers do none of the above.

 Personally, what I love best about the notecard method is the ability to move the notecards around! This makes it easy for me to test out the order and structure of my plot. (It’s a lot easier to move a notecard than it is to move a bunch of text in a document using copy-and-paste.)

If you’ve ever used Scrivener, this probably sounds familiar – and it should! This plotting method is very similar to the storyboarding function on Scrivener, only instead of doing it on your computer, it’s done on a dining room table or a corkboard. (It helps to have understanding roommates, as plotting this way can easily lead to taking over an entire table or wall.)

Are you a Nabokov, a Crichton, a Storyboarder, or something else? Let me know in the comments!