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By popular demand, here is a thread on how I plan a novel, six books in.
The first thing I do is come up with the hook, the pitch, the central question the novel answers. I write that at the top of an excel document.
Then, I work out who is going to narrate and if there is more than one timeline. I write those in columns A, B, C, and D. Here is my book six working spreadsheet. 
(I add a check box into column 1 so that I can literally tick off each chapter as I write it.)
Next, I work out the four or five main points of action in the book. Usually chapter one, a scene in the middle, and a few at the end. A novel for me is roughly 40 excel rows (2000 word chapters per row x 40 = 80,000 words). I write them in, say, row 1, 20, 38, 39, 40.
(Beginning to think I’m a maniac.) Anyway. Over the next week or so, I start to fill in each box. I think of it as breadcrumbing the action. So if in scene 39, someone kills someone else, in 30 I would foreshadow that violence.
Or if, say, if A tells B something in box 20 I might add something in box 19 that says “a cop tells his colleague it would be very bad if A tells B”. And then make A do it. Sometimes I work my way from the initial scene to the action, sometimes I need to think of twists.
Sometimes, I ask myself what the worst thing to happen to this character would be. Sometimes I introduce a subplot. Eventually, the boxes are filled. Here is Anything You Do Say’s boxes, with its old title!
So in that spreadsheet, I had one narrator, a dual narrative, and the middle pink boxes were how the central narrative progressed as well as the individual narratives.
Then I... write each scene as it is in the boxes. The boxes aren’t so detailed as to lose flair or creativity, I don’t think. But they’re visual proof the novel works as a whole, and I find I don’t lose my way. The end.
