True.  It helps to have an outline, or at least a general idea of 
where you're heading.  However, there's little point in enslaving 
yourself to a rigid plan - stories never seem to follow the first 
outline, and take great peverse pleasure in deviating from the path at 
the earliest outline.

I think I may have overstated the detail of the outline.  What I meant 
to convey was that they had _some_ idea of what they wanted to do and 
how they wanted to get there.  When I wrote my long street fighter fic, 
I knew how I wanted it to end, and I had an idea of at least one scene 
that I wanted each character to have at some point in the story, and 
then I came up with very, very sketchy ideas on how to get there.  Often 
the story wrote itself around my plan, and I think the story is better 
because of it, but more or less, I still followed the plan and I don't 
see how a long story could be done otherwise.  :)


Joshua Dyal
j-dyal@geocities.com
http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Arcade/1958/


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