Quote:
Originally Posted by ekster
But something just refuses to click when I try to plan it out at the chapter by chapter level.
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It sounds like you may be an organic writer (also sometimes called a pantser). Some people are, and although it's possible to force oneself to write to an outline, if you are one of those authors who needs to discover the story as it unfolds, outlines will probably always feel unnatural to you.
If that is indeed the case, then I would suggest that, instead of fighting your natural writing style, you could learn to capitalize on it. Organic writers do need to prune more during revision than outliners, but they also tend to write with a ferver and an artistic genius that outliners find difficult to match.
To a certain extent, there is no way to avoid the pain of false starts and scrapped outlines when one is still inexperienced in the craft of writing. Over time, one learns to recognize literary dead-ends while they are still in the planning stages, and avoid them. But for now, it sounds like you're already doing the best thing you can possible do: keep writing.
