Authors, Do you plan your stories?

[RayVer]

I operate on purely vibes and coffee. General idea of where the novel is planned out, but how I get there is flexible and forever changing, beware that this doesn't work for everyone though.

 

[MythicalForest]

I have a set list of hard olot points that wont chsnge (all others can and probably will be changed based on my mindset at the time.
Main characters as well as a few minor chsrcster I love are locked in place for what their chsracter arcs are and their general deaths and impacts but specifics in story chsnge based on other factors.

Besides that write as the thoughts come up and throw a random character a cool power I thought of but didn't attach to someone yet.

 

[DavidBrackett]

That kind of situation is partly what lead the author of "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh" to publish the book (and likely triggered a lot of rewrites when it was filmed and the studio realized the similarity between "Nimh" and "The National Institute of Mental Health" was not a coincidence...)

Sounds like you made the discovery that SOME elements MUST be planned, some simply cannot, and the rest should be plotted more than planned?

Yeah, I think that is true. The rest is discovered based on the landscape (physical landscape, emotional, moral, etc)

 

[MFontana]

When i make my story's outline, it is completely different from it's initial draft.
Ex, arc 1 is supposed to be shorter but the written version is longer.
And for my story i had planned many arcs to come as the outline.

Even i have plans for it's ending already.

Absolutely.
For the most part.
There's one exception of mine where the planning is far looser, and open-ended, but otherwise all of my stories are thoroughly planned out well before I get to writing them.