How to write a novel outline

A counting house on Christmas Eve, cold on purpose, with one man refusing every invitation offered to him.

Marley's ghost, chained to the cash boxes he cared about, promises three more visitors.

Scrooge cannot refuse. The choice is made for him, which suits a protagonist who would not choose it.

The past. He watches himself lose Belle to his own ambition and asks to be taken home.

The present, and the Cratchits' table. The question stops being what happened to him and becomes what he is doing to other people.

The future. His own name on a stone, his possessions sold, and the people selling them cheerful about it.

He asks whether these are shadows of things that must be, or only that may be. The whole book is that question.

He wakes and acts on it immediately, before the feeling can fade. The prize turkey, the raise, the nephew's dinner.

Tiny Tim lives, and Scrooge keeps Christmas well. The change is reported rather than dramatised, which is the ending's one weakness.

A dead man's name still on the office sign, seven years unchanged.

The nephew: Christmas is the one time people open their shut-up hearts. Scrooge says humbug.

Every refusal in one afternoon: nephew, collectors, clerk, the cold. The reader knows exactly what has to change.

The door knocker becomes Marley's face.

He argues with the ghost, blames indigestion, and goes to bed anyway.

The first spirit takes his hand and the wall of his bedroom becomes a field.

Belle, and the version of his life where he chose her. It carries the theme without arguing it.

The school, the warehouse, Fezziwig's dance, the party he was too busy to attend.

The Cratchits eat their small goose and toast the man who underpays them.

Ignorance and Want under the spirit's robe, and and his own words about surplus population quoted back at him.

The third spirit, silent, pointing. A body left in a room with the door shut.

The churchyard, the stone, and the question he cannot get answered.

He promises to keep Christmas in his heart all year, and means it while he is still frightened.

Morning. Turkey, church, his nephew's house, Cratchit's raise, each one reversing a scene from the setup.

Scrooge as second father to Tiny Tim, which is the opening image with the cold taken out of it.

A counting house where the fire is too small and the clerk keeps his coat on.

Marley, in chains, with an offer that is not an offer.

Humbug. He blames the cheese and goes to bed in his nightcap.

Three mentors, one per stave, and none of them explains anything. They point.

The bedroom wall opens onto the road to his old school.

His younger self, Fan, Fezziwig, Belle. The allies are all people he has already lost.

The Cratchits' kitchen, and the crutch propped in the corner where he can see it.

His own grave, unswept, with his name on it and no mourners to argue about.

The knowledge that the future is conditional. Nothing else changes hands.

Waking, still in his own bed, on a morning that has not happened yet.

Sending the turkey anonymously, then going to his nephew's door and knocking anyway.

He keeps Christmas all year, and the town gets a benefactor it did not ask for.

A man who spends his money on other people and is glad to be laughed at.

A man who will not spend a coal on his own clerk.

Marley arrives with the terms: three spirits, one night, no refusing.

Belle returns his promise and he watches himself let her go for a ledger.

He starts asking the spirits questions instead of asking to go home. Will Tiny Tim live?

His own grave, and the certainty that it will go unvisited.

He works out that the future is conditional. That is the tool, and it is the only one he needed.