I had a plan, but I couldn't get my characters to follow it. I essentially put planned waypoints on the plot map, but they just took their own sweet time in ge

I had a plan, but I couldn't get my characters to follow it. I essentially put planned waypoints on the plot map, but they just took their own sweet time in getting to them. I had to burn someone's house down, to make them pick up the pace. I view it a bit as one of those aerial racing games where you have to fly through the rings that define the course. As long as the characters pass within a certain radius of my planned plot waypoints, I don't have to murder any of them to keep them in line (until a character death actually is one of the points). The smaller the allowed radius, the more control you have to exert over the characters to hit the mark, and the more they start to feel like marionettes animated by the author instead of people acting on their own impulses. So I definitely had an ending (plus cliffhanger) in mind before I started. I allowed the amount of narrative it took to get to that ending be a variable. I was actually surprised when one of the supporting characters I wanted to put in the next book parted ways with the protagonist and wasn't there for the ending, but I couldn't do it without making someone act inconsistently.