I think the greatest benefit of plotting out a story before you write is the idea that you'll know where you're going when you get to the end.
As you all know, I'm gearing up for NaNoWriMo 2014 and the novel I'm going to attempt to get 50,000 words into is based on a few ideas I've had and a couple themes I want to explore.
As well, it's a case of living vicariously through the main character a bit, as well as through a couple of the other characters.
The chief reason I'm plotting this novel out ahead of time is the fact that I have a schedule of roughly 1700 words a day to pump out and there's no way, I think, that I'd be able to just "go" at that pace without knowing beforehand where I am headed every day, in terms of developing the story.
So, I've gone onto Scrivener and used the 'corkboard' to plot out 55 chapters.
The outline's pretty sketchy so far, only a sentence or two describing the overall action in those chapters.
However, it's a road-map.
I know how the story starts, how it proceeds, the plot-points and complications that confront the 'hero' and how he resolves them.
If I shoot for a thousand words a chapter, I'll be able to easily top the 50k word goal by November 30.
And, if I somehow manage to complete 2 chapters worth of rough draft a day, I'll actually either hit my goal early or hit 60k words in November (Granted this is a long shot...10,000 extra words is a bit much to ask for, especially while trying to have a life as well.)
At the beginning of drafting my outline, I was lost and a bit overwhelmed because of inexperience.
Traditionally, I'd be a 'pantser' in writing my shorter fiction and tended to let the 'story lead it to it."
However, in a time constraint like NaNo, I can't afford to dead-end a storyline 20k words into it; even wasting a day's writing time can be fatal to my attempt.
So, I made myself learn to plot.
I kind of think of it like learning to code, if you're a programmer, because they are both basic skills that help you understand the underlying structure.
I've had discussions where I was told that over-plotting killed the spontaneity of the novel and made it formulaic... I respond that Frank Lloyd Wright probably knew where his toilets were supposed to go before he started building his houses.
'Framing' a story properly frees you to be innovative....if you know how scenes connect, you can play around with how those scenes play out...
It also saves you heart-ache if you know that Character A will do X in chapter 40, so you can't have him do X in chapter 20 or that he suddenly can't do X because you made him do Y 50 pages earlier, which made doing X impossible, which is sucky if X was going to be the plot twist you needed to resolve Act 2 and set up for the ending.
Ultimately, I think the best argument for plotting is that it gets you to the point that you need to get to in order to finish your novel, what I call Draft 1.0, a complete workable draft from which you can do revisions and change the plot-points that seem clunky and the scenes that seem superfluous suddenly.
Plotting doesn't mean that you etch your ideas in stone, it merely means that you pencil them in, make a draft and then move onto revisions, which is where the work really starts.
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