Prompt details

Tested on

Claude Opus 5.5

Length

497 words · 3 fill-ins

Example input

[Your idea, genre and reader]: A cozy mystery. Harriet "Hattie" Pruitt, 66, retires after 38 years at a county library and moves to Gull Point, a small town on the coast of Maine, to help her niece Julia run the Beacon Light Inn, a converted lighthouse keeper's house. During a fog storm a guest is found dead at the bottom of the lighthouse stairs, and Hattie, who can't leave a mystery uncatalogued, starts asking questions. Readers: cozy mystery readers, mostly women 45 and up, who like a warm community, a puzzle they can solve and no gore. First book of a series.

[Characters and scenes you have]: Characters: - Hattie: precise, kind, a bit nosy, widowed. Keeps a notebook for everything. - Julia, 35, her niece: owns the inn, behind on the mortgage, which makes her a suspect. - Police chief Sam Okafor: patient, tired of Hattie by chapter 3, secretly likes her. - Melvil, the inn's cat, named after Melvil Dewey. - The victim: Gordon Vance, a pushy developer who wants to buy the inn and the land around the lighthouse. - Suspects: Gordon's assistant Paige, a birdwatching couple (the Lindqvists), and Eli Tarr, a lobsterman whose family once owned the lighthouse land. Scenes I have: - Opening: fog storm, power out, the body found at dawn. - Hattie notices the guest book signature for the night of the murder is forged. - Hattie finds a hidden letter in the inn's little library because a book is shelved in the wrong Dewey number. - Climax in the lamp room during a second storm. Unsure: I think the killer should be someone sympathetic, maybe Paige, but I don't know her motive yet.

[Length goal and structure]: About 75,000 words. No structure preference. Cozy rules: the murder happens off the page, no swearing, no graphic violence, and Hattie solves it, not the police.

Example output

The Beacon Light: Outline

1. Logline and premise

Logline: When a pushy developer is found dead at the foot of the lighthouse stairs in her niece's struggling inn, a newly retired librarian who can't leave anything uncatalogued must unmask the guest who forged his last signature, before the police pin the death on her own family.

Premise: Hattie Pruitt, 66, has retired after 38 years at a county library and moved to Gull Point, Maine, to help her niece Julia run the Beacon Light Inn. During a fog storm that cuts the power, developer Gordon Vance dies on the lighthouse stairs. The inn's guest book seems to prove he climbed alone at 11:52 p.m., while the rest of the house sat at Hattie's candlelit card table. Hattie sees that the signature is traced. That makes her own alibi testimony worthless and turns a tidy accident into a murder with five suspects under one roof. As the evidence closes in on Julia and then on Eli Tarr, Hattie has to learn that people don't stay on the shelf where she first put them. That includes the kind young woman she filed as an ally on the first night.

*Marking: (new) appears at the first mention of each thing I invented. Later mentions are unmarked.*

2. Characters

Character	Role	Want	Wound / need	Flaw	Arc (one line)
Hattie Pruitt	Sleuth, POV	To be useful again, and to put this death in its proper place	Wound: widowed and retired, she feels "deaccessioned" (new). Need: to belong somewhere instead of observing it	Files people on first impression and trusts her notebook over her own doubts	From cataloguer of other people's lives to co-owner of one: she admits her record was wrong and chooses to stay
Julia (35)	Niece, inn owner, suspect	To keep the inn	Wound: she has handled everything alone since her mother, Hattie's sister, died (new). Need: to ask for help	Pride and secrecy; she hides the money trouble	From hiding her deal with Gordon to making Hattie her partner

Claude Opus 5.5

Outline a Novel – Novel outline prompt for ChatGPT and Claude

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Claude Opus 5.5

This prompt turns your story idea into a novel outline. Paste your idea, genre, characters, scenes and length goal; you get a logline, character arcs, a beat sheet, every chapter, subplots and setups to pay off.

What you get

A logline, a premise and each main character's want, wound, flaw and arc
A beat sheet and a chapter-by-chapter outline sized to your word count
A subplot map and a table of setups and payoffs, clues included
Every addition marked (new), plus the open choices only you can make

How to use it

1
Put down what you have
Your idea, genre and readers, every character and scene you know, and what you are unsure about.
2
Keep or cut the (new) parts
Everything it invented is marked. Strike what does not feel like your book and answer the open questions.
3
Run it again with your choices
Paste your answers and ask for the chapter outline again, then draft one chapter at a time.

Better results

Answer the open questions in one message and ask it to update only the chapters your answers change.
Ask: "Which chapters have no change in them?" and fix those before you draft.
For a mystery, ask for the killer's side of the story chapter by chapter, to check that every clue is fair.

Questions

Can ChatGPT help write a novel?

Yes. ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are good at outlining: turning an idea into characters, beats and chapters, and spotting holes in the plot. The writing itself works best when you draft the scenes and use AI for the plan, the questions and revision notes.

How do I outline a novel with AI?

Give it your idea, genre, readers, the characters and scenes you already have and your word count, then ask for a beat sheet and a chapter plan with its own additions marked. Keep what fits your book, answer its open questions and run it again.

What is Save the Cat?

Save the Cat is a beat sheet from Blake Snyder's screenwriting book, later adapted for novels: 15 beats, such as the catalyst, the midpoint and the dark night of the soul, at set points in the story. This prompt uses it when you name no other structure.

How many chapters should a novel have?

It depends on your word count and pace; faster genres tend to use shorter chapters. This prompt sets the chapter count from your length goal and gives the average words per chapter, so you can change it before you start drafting.

Updated 8 Nov 2026