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I'm glad to see this post, Merovingian, because I was about to make the same suggestion.
A technique I picked up from my time in the military was backward planning. In other words, if we were going to deploy at 0900 on Monday, then we knew we had to form up at 0730 on Monday, which meant we had to draw weapons at 0645, which meant the morning formation was at 0600, which meant I had to wake up at 0400 to get to post on time, and of course, at X-2 days we had to pick up the supplies we'd ordered at X-10 days ahead of the exercise and so on.
Basically, it deals with knowing where you want your story to end and then backing up through the various steps to ensure you account for all the things that have to happen to get your character to that point from Chapter 1. It is especially useful when you're writing mysteries to ensure you haven't forgotten to leave enough clues to point out who the villain is without it sounding like deus-ex-machina.
Now, I know some people like to start from Chapter One and have no idea where their characters are going to take them, and that's perfectly fine too. However, in my experience, if I don't have a final destination already in mind for my stories, they tend to wander and meander and the first set of edits takes FOREVER to whip this story into shape. Since my first professional writing experiences were doing media tie-ins, I had to have a synopsis/pitch approved by both the editor and the licensor up front and then if I was doing a novel, I had to do a much more in-depth synopsis or even a chapter-by-chapter break down for the licensor to approve before I ever started writing (oh, and the deadline isn't getting any further away while we're cleaning up the synopsis), so the more I developed my plot up front, the quicker I could do my stories. The backward planning was just simply to ensure I hit all the high points and didn't have any plot holes I hadn't patched by the end of the book.
Again, not everyone likes doing this, and I'm never going to say this is the only way to do it, but it works for me.
A technique I picked up from my time in the military was backward planning. In other words, if we were going to deploy at 0900 on Monday, then we knew we had to form up at 0730 on Monday, which meant we had to draw weapons at 0645, which meant the morning formation was at 0600, which meant I had to wake up at 0400 to get to post on time, and of course, at X-2 days we had to pick up the supplies we'd ordered at X-10 days ahead of the exercise and so on.
Basically, it deals with knowing where you want your story to end and then backing up through the various steps to ensure you account for all the things that have to happen to get your character to that point from Chapter 1. It is especially useful when you're writing mysteries to ensure you haven't forgotten to leave enough clues to point out who the villain is without it sounding like deus-ex-machina.
Now, I know some people like to start from Chapter One and have no idea where their characters are going to take them, and that's perfectly fine too. However, in my experience, if I don't have a final destination already in mind for my stories, they tend to wander and meander and the first set of edits takes FOREVER to whip this story into shape. Since my first professional writing experiences were doing media tie-ins, I had to have a synopsis/pitch approved by both the editor and the licensor up front and then if I was doing a novel, I had to do a much more in-depth synopsis or even a chapter-by-chapter break down for the licensor to approve before I ever started writing (oh, and the deadline isn't getting any further away while we're cleaning up the synopsis), so the more I developed my plot up front, the quicker I could do my stories. The backward planning was just simply to ensure I hit all the high points and didn't have any plot holes I hadn't patched by the end of the book.
Again, not everyone likes doing this, and I'm never going to say this is the only way to do it, but it works for me.