Outline a novel with AI and keep continuity

What does this setup do?

Build a full novel outline with AI: premise, act structure, chapter beats, and a story bible of characters and world rules that keeps facts consistent as the outline grows.

Who is it for?

Fiction writers starting a novel who want a structured outline and a way to stop characters changing eye color in chapter twelve.

How do you set it up?

Tools

• ChatGPT or Claude (free tier is fine)
• Your premise in two or three sentences
• A doc to keep the story bible (the AI can generate it, you keep the file)

Steps

1. Write your premise down first: who wants what, what stands in the way, what changes. Two or three sentences is enough.
2. Ask the AI to expand the premise into a three-act outline using a beat sheet. Reedsy describes the Save the Cat beat sheet as 15 beats built on the three-act structure, designed to carry writers through the middle of Act 2.
3. Build the story bible next: for each character, one paragraph on who they are, what they want, and one detail that makes them specific. Add the world rules that cannot bend.
4. Feed the story bible back into every outline session. Sudowrite documents its Story Bible as the "source of truth" the writer and the AI refer back to, and notes that generation only uses characters and worldbuilding elements you explicitly mention.
5. Go beat by beat, not chapter by chapter. Ask for three options per beat, pick one, and lock it into the bible before moving on.
6. When the outline is done, ask the AI to audit it: which beats contradict the story bible, which characters disappear for too long, where the stakes go flat.
7. Review the full outline yourself and rewrite anything that sounds like a template. Reedsy advises that outline models are scaffolding, not paint-by-numbers, and originality comes from character-specific choices.

Help me outline a novel and keep the facts consistent.

Premise: [e.g. "A retired lighthouse keeper discovers the light never went out on its own: someone has been tending it for 40 years"]
Genre and tone: [e.g. "literary mystery, quiet and melancholic"]
Target length: [e.g. "80,000 words"]

First, expand this into a three-act outline using a 15-beat structure. Give me each beat as: beat name, one-sentence description, and the chapter range it covers.

Then create my story bible:
- Main characters: name, one paragraph each (who they are, what they want, one specific detail)
- World rules: the 3-5 facts about this world that can never be contradicted
- Open threads: questions the outline must answer by the end

Rules:
- Flag any beat that contradicts the story bible or the premise.
- Do not invent new main characters without asking me first.
- Keep everything in plain prose, no purple adjectives.

Review the outline before using it. The story bible is yours to keep and feed back into every future session.

Which chat tools work with this prompt?

Paste the prompt into any of these assistants (free or paid tiers).

• ChatGPT
• Claude

What tips make it smoother?

• Lock decisions into the story bible the moment you make them. AI only remembers what you explicitly restate, so the bible is the memory.
• Ask for three options per beat and pick. The first option is usually the most predictable one.
• Name every character before they appear in the outline. Unnamed "the neighbor" characters are where continuity breaks start.
• If you use a writing tool with its own story bible (Sudowrite documents one; Novelcrafter documents its Codex), keep the same bible there instead of retyping it each session.

Where do the claims come from?

Summaries use public sources linked below, not independent verification. How setups are picked.

• Read Reedsy’s write-up (reedsy.com)

  Reedsy: Save the Cat as a 15-beat outlining framework on three-act structure; outlines are scaffolding, not paint-by-numbers.

• Read Sudowrite’s write-up (write.helpkit.so)

  Sudowrite: Story Bible as the source of truth for characters and worldbuilding; generation only uses explicitly mentioned elements.

• Read Novelcrafter’s write-up (www.novelcrafter.com)

  Novelcrafter: Codex for tracking characters, locations, and worldbuilding details; Matrix View tracks them across scenes.