I've been writing on and off for a lot of years and in that time I have tried every method there is in all those books on how to write...outlines never worked for me...mainly because my mind works in a very tangential fashion...I make random associations like crazy and while the basic story idea stays the same, I never seem to get from beginning to end quite the way I planned...I have found that what works best for me is to only write when the muse grabs me by the throat and makes me do it...I can't just sit down and write unless I am feeling really inspired...although I usually know when it's coming as I will have ideas and plot points and lines of dialogue kind of kicking around in my head for days...then when I do sit down to write, it pretty much flows out like stream of consciousness...only with punctuation and dialogue and all...very naturally...then I go back and re-read and re-write several times to do all the trimming and polishing...not quite the method they tend to recommend in creative writing class...in fact I got all kinds of crap for my method in college...but the prof still had to give me B's and A's cuz the end product was good...
They always say "write what you know"...I say "the way you write is the way you write"...whatever works best for you is the way you ought to do it...I am the same way about my painting...I have never taken an art class in my life...unless you count once a week arts and crafts in grade school...and I would never take one because if someone critiqued my method and tried to get me to work in another way, I probably couldn't do it at all...it's the end product that counts...so long as the result is good, what does it matter how ugly your process is?
Now if I could only figure out how to get from the sex back to the plot without a huge non sequitur or obvious and clunky segue
Sandi