This week what I’m finding is that my novel is already past its first third, and what was a fairly linear and easy-to-write story days ago is becoming entangled in a succession of layers and plots that make the overall picture much more fragile than it was before.
Fortunately, before I even started writing the first chapter, I already had a structured idea of the novel, with the big blocks differentiated and the plots perfectly calculated to start independently and later thread together. The problem is that planning is just that, planning. When the time comes, the imagination ends up finding exciting proposals that shake the whole thing like a house of cards.
For the time being I keep writing the novel in chronological order, but if the complexity continues to increase, there will come a time when I will have to write it as if it were a shooting plan. I will write individual scenes, and then put them together like tiles in a mosaic.
How have you, fellow writers, coped with this challenge?
R.J. Logar 
I’ve always just pantsed my way through entire books, and have written myself into corners. But For my latest project, I’m going to try planning the entire thing before I even write my first word. We’ll see how that goes.
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