: Re: Examples of authors/novels that were planned or written on the fly After reading the question Is it OK to invent as I write, or should I plan the entire story first? I was wondering if anyone

@LarsenBagley300

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@ChrisSunami answer does allude to Rowling having planned things out, but there are other instances where Rowling did wing it. Generally, when you plan out a novel or series of serialized stories, you want to write so that certain plot points are hit at certain points in the story, so you can set them up. However, the actual story itself may not be as fleshed out at that point as compared to the final novel. Rowling did not write all Harry Potter books and then released them one at a time. She released book one, then worked on book two, ect. Her early books do seem a little more self contained than her later books, and how much was revisiting clever ideas that had already been introduced or how much was left up and one of the criticisms of book seven was it used plot points that should have been brought up earlier or were contradicted earlier (such as Wands having some kind of loyalty OR characters able to see through the invisibility cloak, which we learned only in this book should not have happened.).

Another case was the second season of the 1994 cartoon Gargoyles, which took two unplanned events and used them to rewrite the entire remainder of the seasons episodes. In the first case, the writers were very impressed by the performance of a Voice Actor who was hired for a single one off villain that was killed at the end of his introductory episode (which also took place 1000 years before the series present timeline). In order to bring him back, much of the first half of Season two was written to lay the plot points regarding his resurrection (and create what is possibly the best framing device for a clip show ever) The second was another voice actor flubbing her dialog due to her accent (she said "You Serve the Human" when the original line was "You serve the humans."). The writers chose to use the flubbed line because it opened the door for the episodes villain (who was the "You" being discussed) to have a bigger role than just being the introduction to antagonistic race he was a member of. It also served to flesh out his connection to already established human characters, none of who were featured in this episode.

In both cases, the crew was flexible enough to let dialog and the acting inform to better introduce future planned storytelling or even in the case of the former, influence the entire following season. In both cases, they used these unexpected coincidences to tie up a variety of loose ends they really did not have plans for.

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