How do you use your plot outline to guide your writing process?

It is important to remember that each genre has a set of tropes the audience needs to recognize. Read as many books in your desired genre before building your plot outline.

I explain the stages and structure of the mainstream or currently-popular plotlines in my scholarly book, "The Formulas of Popular Fiction: Elements of Fantasy, Science Fiction, Romance, Religious and Mystery Novels" (2014). However, as I also argue in this book, the world needs entirely original plotlines that reflect lifelines in reality, instead of repeating the plot-narratives of antique character-types. The Big publishers are likely to reject fiction that does not follow generic rules. But the world needs new highbrow literature and not more pop-fiction. List of the best books of all time tend to end in around 1987 with "Beloved". The century we are living in now might later be called a Dark Age, when no "great" books were written.

In addition... Consider the type of story you're writing. Plot driven: Action, horror, love (not just romance), Character driven: worldview (accepting nuance/gaining knowledge), redemption, validation, crime. These can be mixed and matched though typically there will be no more than two dominant types, typically one plot and one character type.

For my stories, I always find the ending first. Then I fill in the events that will link the inciting incident with the climax. If I can't get an ending all other development work stops until I do find that ending. Quite frequently, I never get the ending and so the story never gets written

Keep in mind the moving pieces of the plot - consider how characters will react, will the protagonists cooperate? Will an inciting incident drive the characters apart? Keep it flexible too, characters often develop a life of their own and a story might evolve as you go along.

Interesting choice here -- in terms of making the entire outline highly detailed before doing any actual writing. That might work. But for both my nonfiction and fiction books, I've found that extensive outlining in isolation can become too much of a good thing. I've had better results, once the main pillars of the outline are clear, by diving in and starting to write the sections where I'm most confident. There's the sheer fun of seeing key scenes come alive. (If writing isn't fun at some point, that's sad. This shouldn't feel like tidying 500 rooms in a big hotel.) Another pro tip: Sometimes writing the final chapter -- way ahead of schedule -- is a big help in clarifying what all the earlier chapters need to do.

I start by writing character studies of my main characters. Then I create a plot chart. After that I write a fairly detailed outline based on the plot chart. I then do a very quick draft of each chapter. When I'm done, I then flesh out everything, making any changes or additions as needed. I tried writing my first few unpublished novels by winging it, and found that it took me a lot longer to write without a stronger structural base. The plot chart and outline keep me on track.

Before I start on the first draft, I mind-map the story. It turns out to be, literally, a graphical synopsis. Along the way, the mind-map often will identify gaps in the plot logic or character development. I use the mind-map to write the first draft