Planning and outlining your story before you write it, so you know where the plot is headed and can craft each scene with the ending in mind.
Plotting is the practice of designing your story's structure, key events, and character arcs before you write the actual prose. Plotters create outlines, beat sheets, scene lists, or other planning documents that serve as a roadmap for the drafting process. The level of detail varies wildly from a loose list of major plot points to a scene-by-scene breakdown with dialogue notes. The core idea is the same: know where you are going before you start walking.
Plotting gives you a safety net. When you know your story's destination, you can weave in foreshadowing, plant setups that pay off later, and maintain a consistent pace without writing yourself into corners. It also tends to make the drafting phase faster and less anxiety-inducing, because you always know what scene comes next.
Take a story idea and write a one-page outline that covers only the five biggest moments: the opening situation, the inciting incident, the midpoint shift, the climax, and the resolution. Keep each one to two or three sentences. Then look at the gaps between those moments and ask yourself what has to happen to get from one to the next.