The Last Ferry to Skerrow: a novel outline

An original story outline, plotted in relative time

“The Last Ferry to Skerrow” is an original story outline written as a Timescrolly example: an invented mystery on an invented island, with invented people. It shows what plotting a novel looks like here, and none of it is real.

A writer rarely knows the calendar date of an inciting incident, only how many days came before it and after it. So this timeline has a floating epoch (Day 0 is the midnight of the night the schoolteacher dies), and every scene is a relative date: “Day −6” is six days before, “Day 1, 06:00” is the morning he is found. Counting is ordinal, so there is no Day 0 on the scale itself: the day of the fire is Day 1, and the day before it is Day −1.

What to look for

• Time on both sides of the inciting event. Act I runs three weeks backward from the fire, Acts II and III forward to the last ferry, Day 24.

• Acts as periods, scenes nested inside them. Open any act to see its scenes: The Quiet Island, The Fire, The Ledger.

• One layer per point-of-view character. Filter to a single layer to read one narrator’s chapters in order: Nell Ashby (layer 1), Tobias Rudd (layer 2), Mairead Quill (layer 3). The threads interleave and meet on Day 9.

• Cause and effect. Scenes are linked with “caused”, “led to” and “contradicts”. Follow the chain from the unrecorded night crossing through the forged ledger line to a confession that the doctor’s finding and a sealed diesel drum contradict.

• Entities. The people, places and boats are entities linked to the scenes they appear in, including the dead man, who is never a point of view.

Filter by tag to follow a thread: clue, cold case, ledger, fire and confession. It is one of the Writing a novel examples.