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@noah-cochran

Do you use chapter by chapter outlines or list of chronological events outlines?

Both! I start with the fifteen beats, then I fill in anything I can think of to get from one to the other and then split that up into chapters. And then before I write it I write an outline for the chapter with as much detail as I think of and a rough idea of the dialogue.

I found that, and listing all the relationships and subplots I want to work with, tends to fill it out a lot more.

Fair.   Cats have a bad habit of getting right in one’s face without thought for the consequences. I almost dropped a dumbbell on one this morning because the goofy thing was trying to figure out what it was.

There’s a reason ‘curiosity killed the cat’ is a saying. They have no concept of risk assessment or self preservation.

That same cat had a habit of jumping on people’s backs while they were bending over. That happened multiple times, but the crowning glory was the time my mom was painting something on a step-ladder and bent down to get something and that extremely large cat decided jumping onto her back was the best possible way to demand attention. Nothing went wrong and we all had some laughs about it XD

I mean, obviously fight scenes for one thing.

I don’t know a single person who claims to be good at fight scenes. They’re painful to write XD

For me I think it’s everytime I introduce a major character (so similar to your beginnings one). I’m not sure to what degree I actually struggle with it, but I always feel like my head is going to implode when I try to show that character’s personality, internal conflict/flaw, backstory, and normal life without either keeping to much back or info dumping. The other big thing that ties into this is making sure it’s very, extremely, explicitly clear why  that character decides to become a part of the plot. A character that starts a journey for no visible reason or at least an interesting explanation of why, is something that I’m always worried about doing.

Oh, absolutely. That’s a really tough one at the best of times. Introducing characters is hard and I always end up redoing it in the second draft.

On that note, thinking of external justifications for why characters are where they are. Most of my main characters are either in their teens or close to it and the main external conflict is a war, so it’s extremely hard to think of a reason why anyone would allow these literal children to do anything. 

I, as the author, frequently think “They’re so freaking young, who allowed them to be here?”

Unfortunately, aging them up would ruin the rest of the plot so I’m stuck with coming up with weird justifications and hoping nobody notices XD I did not think that through when I started writing and now I’m stuck with it XD