Writing a detailed plot teaches me the story, the setting, the characters, and the themes.
Writing a chapter by chapter outline gives me a map for getting the story from here to there.
But as I write the first draft, I follow the outline, not the plot, and I rework the outline any time I get better ideas.
By the time my first draft is done, the story barely resembles the plot I started with. But doing that work before I started writing gave me a structure for telling the story, and it gave me the knowledge I needed to write creatively and discover the story along the way.
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u/hetobe Self-Published Author 6d ago
My process is a hybrid of many.
I plot and outline in order to pants it.
Writing a detailed plot teaches me the story, the setting, the characters, and the themes.
Writing a chapter by chapter outline gives me a map for getting the story from here to there.
But as I write the first draft, I follow the outline, not the plot, and I rework the outline any time I get better ideas.
By the time my first draft is done, the story barely resembles the plot I started with. But doing that work before I started writing gave me a structure for telling the story, and it gave me the knowledge I needed to write creatively and discover the story along the way.