However, as I have seen it, it should be taken into consideration on what exactly you want to do. If you know what you are going to do with your story before hand, instead of coming up with it as you go, things work great. You can avoid writing yourself into a corner and have to end up using a Deus Ex Machina to get your ending. You can also avoid the route of your story being influenced by other things around you. Let me elaborate on that one a bit.
Take The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, for example. This was one of Mark Twain's on going projects. When he wrote what was the end chapters, a movement of literature occurs, called to romanticism movement. Twain caught on to this and used romanticism in his last few chapters (the complicated escape plan). A lot of people (myself included) think this wasn’t good, and consider the complicated ending to what is otherwise a great book bad.
My suggestion, would be to know exactly what you want to do. Of course, there is room for flexibility, as what you write doesn't have to be concrete.
What I do, is a hierarchy of detail. We have the Premise, the Sections, the Chapters, and the Words. The Premise is what the story is about. Sections refer to, say the first half, the third act, etc. Then we have individual chapters after that. Finally, we have the complete manuscript when we get down to the Word level.
Let’s take this example Premise:
The world is covered in a deadly fog, and they must find a way to fix it.
This is the simplest you can be when it comes to planning a story; what it is about. Now it’s time to come up with what happens. Me, I usually divide my stories into three parts.
Act One – The characters try to find a way to survive and navigate the fog.
Act Two – The characters explore the fog, looking for the source of the deadly gas.
Act Three – The characters find the source, and start looking to shut it down.
Now we have expanded the premise into a direction. We have an idea of what will happen in each part of the story. Now it’s time to divide this even more. Down to the Chapter level. In this example, we have a few chapters from Act Three.
Chapter One – They find the large machine. They fly inside and arrive at the dock, and get off. They are astounded by what they see.
Chapter Two – They start to navigate the passages leading toward the control room. However, they get lost and wind up in the basement.
Chapter Three – They try to find their way out of the basement. They wind their way into a labyrinth. Because the labyrinth is ever changing (as to trap intruders), they can’t get out right away.
Cool, we know how we’ll start the last third of the story. Now we are starting to have our route set. Of course, this route can be changed at any time, but it helps a lot.
And finally, the Word level. This is pretty much self-explanatory. I think. Here’s and excerpt from the first chapter.
As the ship entered the hanger, they all stared at the ceiling in awe. They couldn’t believe that this was inside a machine. What was even more astounding was that this machine even existed at all.
They stepped off the ship, and right away, George said “Wow!”
The others couldn’t help but nod in agreement. The sheer size of this place was impressive; after all they had lived in small tunnels all their lives.
The Word level is the actual story itself. This is when the ideas expanded to their fullest. This is when the story actually happens.
Again, this is just my preference to planning a story. However, I think it could be very useful for others, who might not be as good as planning as others.
