Need advise on my writing process

Clearly you should do what you prefer especially as you are not dependent on the income from your writing.

 

Sorry, guys, there is more room for agreement between liberals and conservatives than there is between planners and pantsers. Neither can possibly understand how the other could possibly write that way, yet they both do, and both can be successful at it.

I considered myself an inveterate pantser, though I did a little planning like making sure in The Eagle and the Dragon, I knew the route they were going to take, the terrain, how they were traveling and the season, to make sure I wound up at the destination in the right season. Everything else just happened.

But now, in the sequel to E&D, I have ten characters (from E&D, ten years on) scattered from China to Kazakhstan, the Middle East and Italy. Some require reasons for being where they are at the beginning of the story, and others require a reason for going on the move in a way that will bring them all together in the Middle East, in time for the Roman invasion of Parthia, without having any knowledge of what is going on elsewhere. And along the way, they have to interact with specific actual historical events, which means that they have to arrive at a certain place, and a specific time. So this one has me much more tied to timeline and outline than I ever was with E&D. On the bright side, at least at the beginning, this format lends itself more readily to writing individual scenes, to be linked as I go along, something I thought would have been crazy before. If I gewt bored, or don't know what to do with one set of characters, I can just switch to write about others.

So not only do planners and pantsers have a different approach to writing, some stories force the writer to be more outline and timeline oriented than others do. So no one right answer.

And @noobienieuw, you have my sympathies. I also am a technical writer, with a reputation for being a machine gun that can lay down intense field of words. But I have to keep that style separate from my fiction writing.