I struggled with a novel for several years before taking it to a novel writing workshop that counseled some organization. Not strict "plan out everything ahead

I struggled with a novel for several years before taking it to a novel writing workshop that counseled some organization. Not strict "plan out everything ahead of time," per se, but developing an overall a structure to the story -- understanding what my characters' arcs were, the plot turns, and so on. Most significantly, figuring out where the scenes I had in my head roughly fit into a four-act structure* made it really clear where I needed more scenes. The workshop was pretty intense, but it also let me restart the novel from the ground up and actually finish it; it'll be published in January. (The workshop was at KU's Center for the Study of Science Fiction, led by Kij Johnson.) I think people sometimes imagine the planning approach means more or less writing the entire story as an outline first and not being able to let your characters surprise you, but that's not really true. Some of what I had when I started writing boiled down to "important subplot tied into protagonist's past starts somewhere around here"; it turned out that subplot ended up not only bringing out some of the important themes and riffing on devices in the main plot, but it ended up tying back into a previously published story. I like relatively dense plots -- the novel is science fiction, maybe a bit closer to the hard sf end of the spectrum than the space opera end, but there's a lot of mystery elements -- and playing around with structure a little. At least for me, those are hard to pull off in a satisfying way without laying the groundwork ahead of time. *Classically this is three-act structure, but nearly all modern descriptions of three-act structure, especially in screenplays, talk about how the second act is roughly twice the length of the other two and has distinct halves. I call that four acts. :)