How Romance Writers Taught Me to Outline Thrillers with Post-Its
One of my friends, Asa Maria Bradley, is a fantastic romance writer. Back in the day, we both sat through MFA writing workshops, somehow keeping our eyes from rolling back into our skulls while the professors negged genre fiction.
A couple of years after we graduated, I was struggling to discover what my literary novel—the one ostensibly designed to impress people—was actually about. Sensing my frustration, Asa reached out to let me know that Cherry Adair would be in town. I had no idea who that was.
Cherry was teaching a two-day workshop on plotting and outlining a novel. A lot more deluded at the time, I thought that maybe I could learn something. The workshop was in a coworking space in downtown Spokane. The attendees were all women, and all romance writers. It was a roomful of heavy hitters, including Rebecca Zanetti and Kaytee Robert before she broke big.
As the only man in the class–and having been raised by mouthy sisters–Cherry quickly understood that she could give me an extra helping of grief without my feelings getting hurt.
The Secret to Fiction: Goal, Motivation, and Conflict (GMC)
Cherry was charming, knowledgeable, and wildly funny. She had an Afrikaner accent, hair dyed an implausible Kool-Aid red, and lots of jewelry. Her workshop boiled down to two core tenets:
- Every writer—especially literary writers—should own a copy of Debra Dixon’s GMC: Goal, Motivation and Conflict: The Building Blocks of Good Fiction.
- You need to outline.
During the breaks and at the end of the day, Cherry played a verbal game with the attendees. We would pitch our novel ideas, and she would diagnose the structural problems based on goal, motivation, and conflict. New York Times bestsellers eagerly raised their hands and walked us through what their protagonist wanted, why they wanted it, and why they couldn’t have it. Cherry literally fixed books that had been stalled for months or years right there on the spot.
Then, she called me out: “What are you working on?” Because of my MFA, I was an old hand at talking abstractly about writing. I babbled about art and agency and thematic structure until everyone in the room looked confused. Asa made a yikes face.
Cherry shook her head, laughed, and said, “I can’t help with that.”
Whether it was from generosity or perceptiveness, she followed up with, “What else do you have?”
Guilty, I shrugged and mentioned a gritty mystery novel I’d been kicking around in my head. Cherry forced me to answer the goal, motivation, and conflict of the story:
- The Goal: The main character, Mira, must find her missing sister.
- The Motivation: Her sister is her last remaining relative. She dropped out of college to keep Mira out of foster care. Their dad vanished in a ‘92 Bronco when they were kids. It’s the exact same make, model, and color as the Bronco that just crashed into their family cabin the same night her sister went missing.
- The Conflict (Why she can’t get it): The person responsible for this is clever, deeply embedded in the town, and has gotten away with much worse.
Cherry cackled. “You should write that one. Anyone would read that.”
The New York Times bestselling romance writers all nodded in agreement.
Spoiler alert: I did write that one. It’s called GHOSTS IN THE PINES, and it comes out in September 2026. Click here to read the first chapter for free!
How to Outline a Novel Using Post-It Notes
Once we had our goal, motivation, and conflict dialed in, Cherry walked us through how to plot a novel using a grid and colored Post-It notes.
The grid had twenty boxes (five wide and four high) to represent chapters or major scenes. The top-left is Chapter 1, and the bottom-right is the climax. There were eight colors of Post-Its, and each signified a specific element: location, villain, heroine, hero, etc.
Using Goal, Motivation, and Conflict, we simply listed out what the villain, heroine, and hero wanted, how they sought to get it, and how they failed. Since these were romance writers, we plotted a romance together in a frighteningly short period of time.
I can’t recall the exact plot we came up with, but the goal, motivation, and conflict looked something like this:
The Heroine:
- Goal: To save her family’s small-town coffee shop.
- Motivation: She was raised in the shop and needs the money to keep her dad comfortable in assisted living.
- Conflict: A massive, corporate coffee stand—Mocharitaville—was just built across the street.
The Hero:
- Goal: Set up a new branch of Mocharitaville, make it profitable, and get back to the city.
- Motivation: Financial stability to take care of his daughter, who he has sole custody of.
- Conflict: The stubborn heroine across the street. Also, his daughter keeps acting out, running away, and getting kicked out of school in this new rural burg.
We made Post-Its for the major plot points and moved them around the grid into the best possible narrative order. Fortunately, romance and mysteries both have a pretty standard set of narrative beats dictated by the genre.
The Climax: The rebellious daughter accidentally burns down the Mocharitaville.
The Meet Cute: They meet. He’s stranded; she gives him a ride.
The Inciting Incident: She realizes he’s the corporate suit responsible for the ugly Mocharitaville ruining her life.
Rising Action: His daughter messes things up in town. Her father adds a complication from the nursing home.
The Midpoint: The hero and heroine are forced into the same corner to solve a mutual problem. Someone needs to parent the daughter; the daughter and the grandfather strike up a friendship.
Why the Post-It Method Works for Thrillers
Outlining with Post-Its is an extremely efficient method for generating ideas and spotting structural black holes.
By using different colors for different character threads, it’s easy to visually spot if a point-of-view character vanishes in the second act, or if there simply isn’t enough plot to fill a whole book yet. With $20 in stationery and an afternoon, you can map out the broad strokes of a 90,000-word novel.
The best part is the physicality of it. You can walk past the grid on your wall with a basket of laundry, frown, stop, and move the discovery of the dead body two chapters sooner.
You get the gist, right? By utilizing goal, motivation, conflict, and outlining, I went from holding onto two “literary” novels that I could barely explain, to cranking out four thriller novels in a couple of years—a shift that ultimately landed me two top-tier literary agents. In my next post, we will dive deeper into the grid. I’ll go over The Art of the Novel Outline, and show you exactly how to structure the pacing of a thriller.
