2. After a few years of working with plans, as opposed to years working without plans, sometimes I do find it limiting. I do alter plans quite a lot and like to keep things general enough that I can fill in blanks. Planning helps me clarify plot points, better understand characters, to have reference points when my understanding gets muddy.
A tangential thought, but related. Prior to implementing planning processes, I would start writing some idea that popped into my head. I would labor over a few paragraphs, get very excited, and let things grow. Then I would reach a plateau, get frustrated or distracted, and put the story away for a while. While I do have finished work from that period, I have a lot more unfinished fragments. I have gone back to these fragments only to realize that the story was half-baked, or that I couldn’t remember what was supposed to happen.
By writing an outline first, I at least have a way to remember where I was going. By waiting until I know the ending (roughly) before writing the outline, I save myself the frustration of not having a direction to go in when I’m writing the story. Also, planning doesn’t always make the actual process of writing any easier.

3. I don’t think that planning is a necessity for each person, ergo I don’t think it’s necessary for all disciplines. Short pieces always involve less planning. Outlines are one paragraph tops, sometimes just a list of quick plot points.

2. I can’t plan unless I’m halfway through writing, at which point everything is a big ol’ mess and I have to sort it out in my head before I can keep going. At that point it’s more a matter of clarifying for myself rather than deciding what to write. Anything non-fic under about 1200 words I don’t plan at all. For fiction, I can omit planning up to about 5000 words.

3. No, I don’t think they’re necessary for short pieces but that’s mainly because I can hold those in my head without getting lost, and I only plan to remind myself of my intentions.

2. Sort of. That’s part of the attraction of a plan for me. I do tend towards very complicated plots, so if I lay down a skeleton that I need to stay within, it prevents me from wandering off into the realms of metafiction. Even with a plan I still do that, but I then look at what I’ve written and what I planned to write and realise a lot sooner how far off the beaten path I’ve gone than if I didn’t have one.

That said, I do sometimes find myself with a hard decision of whether moving away from what I’ve planned might result in a better story. Those are tough, and I usually have to think for a pretty long while, or even write a completely separate plan or start writing the story again to get to the answer.

3. Not as much? For me I still have at least a sketch of an idea in whatever I write. Even if it’s a 100 word rabble, I’ve got that many words again describing what’s going to happen. But I think it’s more of a function of the largeness of the idea rather than the largeness of the form. So a poem may be 10 lines long but contain a very profound idea/observation. In those cases I’d definitely want to have a conversation with myself on paper to be able to bring it into focus. Whereas if the idea is small, I would be happy to just have a few lines of confirmation of the story arc/characters laid out before starting.

So what do y’all think?