: Re: How much planning should go on before beginning writing? I really want to begin my first novel, but I'm just not sure how clear of an outline I should have before I start. Is a detailed

@Megan928

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Some writers produce better stuff when they plan and outline and world-build a lot. They're sometimes called outliners.

Some work better by just jumping in and writing (discovery writers).

Everyone is different, but you can learn which one you are (or rather, where you sit on the continuum between the two extremes) by trying both.

For example:

For a recent story, I began by planning plot, setting and characters enough until I could see key scenes appearing in my imagination. At that point I made myself stop outlining and actually wrote some of those key scenes to "flesh them out".

Getting the whole scene on paper helped me learn a lot about my plot, and characters. I saw some problems and had some great ideas. So I went back and changed my outline.

I did the opposite, too - after writing a few more scenes out, I returned to the outline to see if I liked the direction I was going. I fiddled with the outline to improve a few things, then used that to chop and change the written scenes.

The problems you need to avoid are:

Outlining too much and never getting started with the actual writing (the Writing Excuses guys call this "World-Builder's disease")
Jumping in with no planning and writing thousands of words that never go anywhere

Edit:
I ended up doing a more detailed post about this on my blog.

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