Writing more is simple.

So if you listen to or frequent discussions of writing fiction you've probably heard people talk about outlining versus not outlining. For years I have been confused about this point. Let me relate my experience and perhaps it will make some sense. So several years ago I was out walking, and this was at a time that I was carrying around a notepad to jot down ideas. Well I had an idea about a play focusing on a vain and self important count. The idea came out pretty well formed and I wrote down a. Basic outline of the various scenes of the play. The next day I started writing the play on a computer we had that did not have Internet access and was finished within a month. It seemed that writing from an outline was therefore the best way to write. Everything had gone so smoothly, the play spilled out quickly, I had little writers block, and the finished product was pretty decent. Over the last decade I have taken that to mean that I ought to be writing an outline when I write something, and have been struggling with it. At various times I will have some inspiration And write an entire play or short story from that inspiration, but then I've tried writing from an outline, first I would write the outline and then try to write from that outline. Writing from an outline in this fashion produced very stiff and uninteresting writing, and what's more is that the writing was very hard, like pushing against a brick wall in my mind. So of course I decided that I must be the kind of writer that writes from inspiration. Waiting for inspiration is a tricky thing because it is so frequently hard to find. Inspiration also does not come to those who are not prepared. If if you aren't writing then you are not really prepared for inspiration, and if you must haves inspiration to write then you won't be writing. It's a good way to get bogged down and spend years not writing very much even though you sincerely want to. In the last two days I have written 1,394 words and 2,100 words on a story that I started sometime in 1997. I have tried to write the story many times before with and without an outline and never got half as far. What has changed? Well i read a blogpost http://thisblogisaploy.blogspot.com/2011/06/how-i-went-from-writing-2000-words-day.html and another from the same blogger about her process for plotting a novel in 5 steps. What I realized is that I needed to know what I was going to write next. I had been approaching writing without knowing what I wanted to write. It was like I was building something without any particular plan or structure and so I would be looking at the smallest component a sentence in a scene and trying to decide what that sentence should look like without knowing if I was building a sports car or a nuclear submarine. It makes sense to me that I can write a one act play or a short story from inspiration because I can hold that whole structure and plan in my mind, but it's a much harder thing to hold all the particulars of a longer story in mind while writing. I can't help the feeling that I should have gotten this years ago. I guess that's just how life goes, anyway I can't turn back the clock. I was going to say something about Ayn Rand's book art of fiction because she talks about knowing things about what you a writing before you write, but she doesn't specifically apply it to the process of writing and whether and how to make outlines. Anyhow I think I've rambled enough, and exposed the fact that it is also good to have a plan before going into writing something as simple ass a blog post. I wrote this on an iPad, so any typos are the fault of Apple.