Mary Catelli's Erraticly Updated and Exceedingly Ill-Organized Journal

The heroine is off traveling. I have her impulsively stop somewhere she did not reasonably think would help her on her quest. (Frustration might play some part, since she doesn't have much hope of any place helping her.)

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Ah, time for the faction sheet.

A useful sheet, like the character sheet, to help you keep track of what's going on.  There's nothing like multiplying the number of different things that characters want to make the story complex. (As long as you keep them clashing. It matters a lot less how strong the desires are than that they can't all get what they want. )
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Ah, the muddle in the middle. . . I took up outlining to keep from petering out in the middle of the manuscript.  Not because it does not peter out in the middle of the outline, but because it is less frustrating when it does.

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That old chestnut, the mysterious hooded figure that arrives with the news of the quest. . . you know he's got a lot of potential for menace there.

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J. R. R. Tolkien had problems with this.  In one letter, he wrote that the problems the hobbits had with the Old Forest and the Barrow Wights, and later the whole Fellowship with the mountain pass, were not directly caused by Sauron.  But he had notes saying that the Ringwraiths roused up those evils. . . .

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Subplots.  Where writing resembles juggling. . .
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I think I have read one too many complaint about main characters so seldom having parents in fantasy.
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Working on an outline has given me a new appreciation of having all your factions subsumed into two by the time of climax.
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An Orson Scott Card essay on conflict, particularly the forms he refers to as "complication" and "entertainment."

I do not think my meditations will be meaningful without you having read it first -- go ahead, I'll wait.  0:)

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Long ago I discovered the charm of the character sheet, which made looking up the name of the red-haired and catty gossip three chapters ago a lot easier.

Recently I have started to discover the charms of a faction sheet, which is rather more distilled.  It has a  list of the factions in the story and therefore excludes all the bit characters and lumps together all who want the same objective and are working together.  Rather handy when I'm stumped in the outline.  I look at the list and pick someone who could be doing something now.  Preferably something that demonstrated bone-headed inability to understand the character I just dropped.  (Dramatic irony is the great tool of a multi-POV story.)

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