It's lovely to hear all your different approaches to this! I am find that it's necessary for me to plot out my stories for the reason that I often don't have enough going on/enough subplots and the like to flesh out a full-length novel. I need to spend lots of time thinking it all through and fleshing everything out so that I know where and when I can incorporate secondary plots and characters without running the story off-course.
kingjon wrote: I second the "welcome to the club" 
Thank you
kingjon wrote: Before I embarked on "the snowflake method," I was using a planning technique I call "iterative outlining," starting by outlining stories into broad arcs, then each arc into "sequences," then each sequence into scenes ... and that's as far as I ever got; I planned to "outline each scene by action" next. I now think that this was in general a sound method, but that the approach I took of working through each of the dozen-and-a-half or so stories on my series meta-outline at the same level before returning to any of them for the next level was not.
This sounds pretty similar to what I'm doing for my current WIP—by breaking it down into multiple steps, I can focus a little better, but not be stuck working on just one part of the story at a time. I like to jump around from middle to end to beginning without worrying whether or not it will all be cohesive in the end.
Domici wrote: I use notebook paper, Chris Vogler's "The Writer's Journey", and 3x5 cards for scenes. Each stage has a divider in the 3 ring binder and I make notes as I go.
I love doing planning by hand—something about writing it out with a pen/pencil helps me brainstorm in a way that feels more productive and I dunno, insightful? somehow than when I'm simply smashing out words on a keyboard.
Lt. General Hansen wrote: I've used a variety of methods in the past--the Snowflake method is solid, and I've used Scrivener as well, especially for stories where I'm piecing together different drafts or writing the book out of order (which I do a lot). However, for my current work, I've been writing straight plot synopses. They vary in detail, although because the book is long and complicated, they're usually 5k-10k-word synopses. I'm doing it this way because I need to make absolutely sure the plot of this book holds up all the way through, since it's incredibly complex, and I don't want to discover halfway through that my plot has holes. XD
I've experimented with the Snowflake method as well—I find it a little more restrictive than I like, at least for jumping in. I like to do lots of free writing about a piece to try to solidify it in my mind before actually trying to summarize it. And I still struggle with the 'elevator pitch' kinds of summaries.
I like the idea of the synopses. I should definitely give that a try at some point.
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*high five* What book were you working on?