Novel Study downloads

Free companions to the Novel Study books. The spreadsheet and the question sets work on any novel you want to study, including your own.

Graphic of a computer showing the story spreadsheet

A scene-by-scene map of a novel: summary, internal and external intensity, POV, story questions opened and closed. Use it to track a novel as you read, or to reverse-outline your own manuscript and chart its intensity. Includes instructions for building intensity graphs in Google Sheets.

Thirty-nine questions for studying any novel, grouped by craft element — plot structure, openings, scenes, character, backstory, point of view, interiority, setting, dialogue, sentences, endings, theme. Answer the ones that interest you and skip the rest. (They also make excellent book club discussion questions.)

Scene-tagging template

A Word template for breaking a scene into its seven components — action, dialogue, setting, character, interiority, summary, backstory — so you can see the texture of what you've actually written. Tag with one click, then count by hand, by macro, or by AI.

Get the template

Strategic revision questions

Twenty-five questions for the three levels of a novel — story, scene, and sentence — each linked to the chapter in Bestsellers that goes deeper. Printable, for charting your own revision path.

Get the questions

More Novel Study

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