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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/40158
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

There are nearly as many opinions on this subject as there are writers.

Some people meticulously plan out every little detail of their stories in advance. This is often done by writing an outline of the plot and iteratively refining it, so these people are sometimes called "outliners." A major advantage of outlining is that (for example) while writing chapter 10, it is very unlikely that you will suddenly realize you need to go back and rewrite chapter 1 to allow for a subsequent plot development. However, some people think it feels too sterile. It's a lot of up-front work before you get to write a page of "real" story (though many outliners will produce vignettes and other "throw-away" material to get a better sense of characters and world building).

Other people like to make things up as they go along. This is sometimes known as "writing by the seat of your pants," and these people are sometimes called "pantsers." A major advantage of this is that it gives you a good subjective feel for the characters and their interactions earlier, which can spark ideas about where the plot should go. However, the same work that the outliner puts in also needs to be done by the pantser, just in a different order. Instead of doing it all up-front, it's spread out over the course of the entire writing process. Some people like writing and editing all as a single process, others abhor it.

An even more extreme version of pantsing was practiced by the late Douglas Adams:

> The story grew in the most convoluted way, as many people will be surprised to learn. Writing episodically meant that when I finished one [radio] episode I had no idea about what the next one would contain. When, in the twists and turns of the plot, some event suddenly seemed to illuminate things that had gone before, I was as surprised as anyone else.
> 
> -- Douglas Adams, _The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide_ (Introduction)

Obviously, once an episode had aired, he was no longer in a position to change it. He had to compensate for any infelicities which had been introduced in previous episodes, without rewriting them. Not a task for the faint of heart!

I have not heard the radio series, so I don't know how he accomplished it in that medium. But in his books, it is evident that he is following a strategy of introducing a large volume of seemingly minor details, and then opportunistically recalling them if and when they align with subsequent events. This works well in a comedy, which can reasonably expect to have [lots of random events with no significance](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RandomEventsPlot). It is harder to pull off in a drama.

I should note that this is a continuum. You don't have to carefully outline every last thing that happens in your story before you start writing early scenes, and you also don't have to sit down at your keyboard and make everything up on the spot. Whatever you come up with will likely be an organic process somewhere between these extremes.

**Having said all of that, you need to have a plot,** and you should prioritize finding the plot over most other concerns. You don't necessarily need one _now_, or even in the next six months. But if you want your story to be a story, and not just a sequence of Things That Happened to People, there has to be a point to it all. Writing early scenes may help you identify sources of conflict, which you can build up into a plot. But you should keep them in the early draft format until you have a plot. Polishing scenes and filling them out without knowing what they are meant to accomplish will just be a waste of time.

Original score: 29