How do I keep my outline and my draft in one place?

In Word or Google Docs

Both can hold an outline inside the manuscript if the chapters use heading styles. In Word, View → Outline shows the headings as a collapsible tree. Collapse it to the chapter level and you are looking at the plan, and dragging a heading moves the chapter under it. The Navigation Pane gives a lighter version beside the page. Google Docs builds its document outline from the same headings, in the panel on the left.

For the synopsis of each chapter, write a line or two directly under the heading in a style of its own, and delete those lines before you send the book out. Some writers use a comment on the heading instead, which keeps the note out of the text altogether. Either way, the note is only true until the chapter changes.

If you plan in Plottr

Plottr is a plotting tool without a place to write the prose, so a Plottr writer always has two applications open. That means two records. Plottr can export an outline to Word or Scrivener to start the draft. After that they drift. How far depends on a few habits, and on how much revising the book needs once the first draft shows you what the plan got wrong.

• Decide which one is the record. Before the first draft it is the plan; once a chapter exists, the chapter wins and the card follows it.
• Give scenes the same titles in both places, so a card and a heading can be matched at a glance.
• Update the cards at the end of each revision pass rather than as you go. Doing it scene by scene breaks the flow of writing and is the step that gets skipped.
• Keep a dated copy of the Plottr file from before a big restructure, so the old plan is there to compare against.

In Tabularia

The Outline is read from the prose itself: a Chapter Heading makes a chapter row and a scene break makes a scene row, so it cannot fall out of date. Each row carries a comment, which is where the synopsis goes, and the Outline's toolbar opens every comment at once for reading the plan end to end. Starting a project on a story shape seeds the Acts and Chapters and names each for the job it has in the story, and a shape with beats fastens them through the manuscript on a timeline of its own.

For plot threads and point-of-view strands, timeline markers sit on the passages that carry them. An anchor holds its place through editing, so a rewritten scene keeps its marker. An existing Plottr outline comes across through its Word export, whose headings become chapters and scenes.

What is missing is a card board. There is no corkboard of index cards to shuffle, and Plottr's grid of plotlines against chapters has no exact counterpart. You can block out empty Chapters and Scenes from the timeline drawer before writing them, and reorder Outline rows, but the plan is always the manuscript's own structure rather than a board kept beside it.