Stories are organic. They grow. Your job is to tend them.
The trouble with planning is that it only works for achievements you can describe in advance. You can win a gold medal or get rich by deciding to as a child and then tenaciously pursuing that goal, but you can't discover natural selection that way.
In most cases the recipe for doing great work is simply: work hard on excitingly ambitious projects, and something good will come of it. Instead of making a plan and then executing it, you just try to preserve certain invariants.
Paul Graham
This reminds me of Bruce Lee's “style of no style.” Planning is rigid. The goal is fluidity. Fluidity is achieved through awareness.
Watch what happens, write it down.
Stephen King