I've never had success with extensive planning ahead of time, but I've never written anything with plot threads complex enough that they *needed* to be plotted ahead of time. It varies a bit - sometimes I have a general idea where I want the story to go and the marks I want to hit along the way (TAY*J), sometimes I just know the end and make up everything else on the fly, and on very rare occasions I have literally no idea what's going on until it comes out on the page. And by very rare, I mean it happened once. Maybe twice. XD

Incidentally, the longer I wait to start, even for the best intentions - like wanting to flesh out an idea that really needs it, say - the less likely it is to happen, no matter how much I love the idea and how clearly I see it. The majority of my completed fic is *not* ideas I loved and cherished and really wanted to write, it's ideas spontaneously generated for challenges and such. Which doesn't mean I'm not pleased with how they turn out in the end, it's just I've got even more trapped in my head! The other effective goad is seeing as how I write mostly RPS fandoms, if there's a really inspiring canon situation that's pinging me, I'll be more likely to try and jump on it before it becomes irrelevant.


Easiest: TAY*J. Like falling off a log.
Hardest: toss-up between Can't Go Home Again and Dry Season. Which are not incidentally probably my two best. XD