Writing a short story: part 7

The past few days I've given a post-writing review of what I did and how. Today I thought it might be more helpful to talk about my pre-writing process and how I get started.

The first thing I do is look at my outline, which in this case is pretty simple: a single sentence describing pinch 2 as "the posse attacks the necromancer in his lair, things go horribly wrong, and they get killed/captured." With that in mind, I take stock of where the story is so far: I know who's on the posse, I know w...