The ups and downs of writing "blind" · 8:05am Feb 26th, 2019
Like, winging it the entire way through the story, without any idea of what'll happen or where you're going.
Positives: It's often more enjoyable, at least personally, to let the story "write itself", and generally, I tend to have a better time making the story flow naturally if I skip over planning out anything beyond bare-bones plotlines. I like the suspense in not knowing what'll happen next even in my own stories, and more often then not, I find myself pleasantly surprised by the outcome. It's nice to be able to be able to experience the same thing as a writer as the readers do when they read.
Negatives: The having no idea where you're going thing is really a double-edged blade. While it does help me write events that connect and flow more naturally, it tends to also have a decent chance of derailing the entire story from where I envisioned it to go, which historically, has led to me simply losing interest in the story. Planning allows me to dedicate myself more to the story, pushing me to put more thought into it. Many of the stories where I skipped out on planning have relatively obvious plotholes and loose threads within them, and even among stories where I've planned the most, I'm sometimes still surprised to come across a gaping inconsistency within the story.
TL;DR: If you don't plan, you'll have fun, but at the high risk of killing your story early. If you do plan, your story will generally be much higher in quality, but things begin to suck as you stress more and more about said quality.
Literally all of the stories I've wrote
But over-planning is bad too, especially when you do what I do, which is write the entire story in your head first and then it's a pain in the neck to actually write it write it.
I have a general idea of how my fics are going to go. Sometimes I'll freewrite though.
Its all in how you word it, I can say I helped the Pope and you can find a way to twist my words on me