Decide What to Keep: The Thriller Novel Workbook
Your reader came for the dread: the bomb under the table, the door that shouldn't be open. The opening scene arrives easily. Holding the pressure for three hundred pages, rising the whole way, is the part that breaks.
Decide What to Keep: The Thriller Novel Workbook is a 317-page fillable novel planning system that builds the plan before the plot: the antagonist's whole scheme, written forward to the day it finishes, then the story of what stopping it costs. Every writing line is a real text field. Type into it, save, pick it back up on any device.
Inside:
The antagonist's plan, built first — the whole scheme written forward, so the plot has something real to collide with
A 40-chapter outline — a two-page spread for every chapter, sequenced for the genre's short-chapter pace
Subgenre riders — one page each for psychological, domestic, techno, legal, spy, and action, adjusting the stakes, the clock, and the word count to your shelf
A plant ledger and misdirection ledger — the clues that survive a reread, and every red herring paired with the true clue it hides
A knowledge ledger and trust ladder — who knows what at six turns, and who the protagonist trusts when they shouldn't
A plausibility gate — why phones, cameras, and search don't solve chapter one, answered before a reviewer asks
A twist budget and the landing — two to four reversals that recontextualize instead of surprise, and the chapters after the last one
Character profiles with sketch pages — protagonist, antagonist, and suspects, each with an image frame
The payoff gate — the checklist your ending must pass before you write
A "Stuck?" guide — for the moments most writers quit
For writers who'd rather decide than drift.
317 pages. Over 1,700 typeable fields. A tappable contents page that jumps you straight to any section.
Perfect for first-time thriller writers, subgenre straddlers from psychological to spy, and anyone whose villain keeps politely waiting to be caught.
