Test Your Novel’s Potential

“Is my novel idea worth pursuing?”

How can you know you will fall in love with your novel without spending hours of writing, stringing together thousands of words, and creating dozens of scenes before realizing it doesn’t work?

Try this:

Jessica Brody, author of Save the Cat Writes a Novel, recommends just writing the single scene beats. It’s a quick way to see how much promise your unwritten novel has.

These scenes are:

• The Catalyst: The inciting incident that disrupts the protagonist’s world and forces them to face change, often posing a question the story must answer.
• The Break into Two: The moment the protagonist makes a choice (or is pushed) into the “upside-down world” of Act Two, leaving their comfort zone behind.
• The Midpoint: A major turning point—often a false victory or false defeat—that raises the stakes, reveals new information, and shifts the story’s momentum.
• The All Is Lost: The lowest point where it seems the protagonist’s goal is unattainable, often marked by a symbolic “whiff of death.”
• The Break into Three: A fresh insight or discovery propels the protagonist into Act Three with a new plan, combining lessons from both halves of the story.
• The Final Image: The closing snapshot that mirrors or contrasts the opening image, showing how the protagonist and their world have changed.

For a 100,000 novel, these scenes would be around 1,000 words each. That’s only 6,000 words.

Doesn’t that sound doable?

And these are the major turning points of the story. An additional benefit of doing this: I can hit all the major points of the story, from beginning to end, and now I can fill in the blanks with the other beats.

But the main reason for doing this as a first draft is to see if I think this novel will have any potential without spending an absorbent amount of time writing a complete draft.

It’s worth a try.

Here are more details about Save the Cat Writes a Novel.

---

My Linktree

---

Photo by Gustavo Fring