<aside> ⚠️ Although this guide is laid out in sequential order, the ordering of these steps is completely up to you. Everyone's writing process is different, and this template is by no means meant to impose any sort of structure upon your process if you don't want it to. Having said that, if you're an online writer who's been struggling to be more organized with your projects, then you might find the sequence of steps I've provided here helpful.
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If you're new to Notion, make sure you've created a new free or paid account first. This template is compatible with free workspaces and paid workspaces alike. Once you have an account, navigate to this template and click the 'Duplicate' button in the top right corner of the page.
If you have a general premise in mind for your story already, then this is the time to write it down. In this step, you can come up with a working title and summary, as well as clarify the story's fandom (if applicable), genre, and rating. These details might change as you write more of your story, but it can help to have them as guide posts regardless.
Before you start writing anything, you might want to gather story research first. The 'Story Research & Planning' section of this template is meant to be a place where you can store multimedia snippets about inspiration and research you've collected for this story. This page is divided into research by chapter, but it also provides a page for general planning.
If you're the type of writer who likes to use visual imagery to enhance your writing process, then a moodboard is a great way to do so. You can include multimedia content within the moodboard included in this template. Photos, videos, audio files, web bookmarks, PDFs, etc are all fair game anywhere in this template, but especially on the moodboard page!
Hopefully the previous steps will have given you enough confidence to have a general idea of where you'd like your story to go. This is where a story outline, or a plot outline, can help! The 'Plot Points' column within your 'Story Chapters' database is a great place to write your story outline because it simultaneously helps you anticipate the number of chapters you'll probably need to plan for.
The placeholder plot points used in this template are based on the Hero's Journey as delineated by Reedsy Blog.
Now that you've done some preliminary research and created a story outline, you're well prepared to begin writing the story itself! It's pretty self-explanatory, but click on a chapter to begin editing it.
Editing a Chapter's Word Count:
<aside> ⚠️ The word count for each chapter has to be updated manually. Unfortunately this is one of the limitations of the tool itself.
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To view the word count of an individual chapter, click on the meatball menu in the top right of the page, and scroll to the bottom of the menu that appears. The word count will be listed near the bottom of the menu in grey.
