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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/27223
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/27223
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The danger you can run into with that kind of detailed planning (there are dangers in all approaches to a large piece of work) is that it can lead you to focus on plot at the expense of conflict.

Stories are essentially about recreating the experience of conflict and its resolution: what is it like to fight a battle, what is it like to compete for the love of a woman, what is it like to search for buried treasure. Each chapter of a novel should give some new insight into the nature of these conflicts and their resolution.

Plot is a device for creating the occasions on which the conflicts occur. A plot should be built to progressively heighten the experience or to reveal new aspects of the experience.

If you plot out a story without keeping the escalation and exploration of conflict in mind, however, you are likely to end up with scenes in which there is nothing actually to tell. Events may have to occur in order to set up the next scene in which the conflict can be escalated or explored, but unless those events actually contribute to the escalation or exploration, they should not be dramatized.

We have all read novels in which large gaps of time occur, and in which any events occurring within those gaps are narrated briefly when the story resumes, just to fill in the gaps. The gaps in time are there because no escalation of exploration of the conflict occurs in that period. The passage of time may, indeed, be necessary to get to the point where it is possible to further escalate or explore the conflict.

But if your plot plan does not recognize this, if your planning has not included the arc of conflict for each major character, and if your plot is not mapped out to support those arcs, you are going to find that when you start writing, you have a bunch of scenes planned in which there is nothing actually to say because those scenes do not escalate or explore new ground in any of the conflicts.

A related problem you may run into is the each of your character's actions are driven by their personality and their conflict. If those things were not fully accounted for in your planning (and sometimes even if they were) you will sometimes find yourself with a plot plan that requires Tom to do X, but it is now obvious to you, having written Tom and his conflict for some time, that Tom would not do X in this situation.

Now you are stuck. You have a whole plot planned out which hinged on Tom doing X at a critical moment, but it is now obvious, based on all you have come to know of Tom, that he simply would not do X, and so either you have to replan the second half of the novel around Tom doing Y instead, or you have to replan the first half to create the circumstances in which Tom would do X. Until you resign yourself to this, however, you are just going to feel stuck, unable to write the next scene.

The only way out of this that I can see is to stand back and look at the arcs of conflict in your story and figure out why they have stalled out at this point.

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