The Quest for Plot, Part 2: My Turbulent History with Plotting

I have never really been a big plotter/outliner before.

I did successfully outline my first novel entirely — and I went from blank page to finished rough draft in 16 days — but I spent 18 hours a day every day on it, and the whole experience was so difficult and messy, mentally, and the plot was so thin and predictable that I swore I would never use that process again.

Ever since, I’ve kind of held my nose up at it and pretended it wasn’t important (because I had no idea how to do it, and snoot...