This was a panel at #Nerdcon 2016.
Katrina Ostrander
She's a fiction writer as her background
If you stick to the three act structure, nothing will work.
For example, lord of the rings as a game.
You have 100 pages of notes
And you assume you're going to succeed
Flash forward a couple of sessions and the ringwraiths are in hot pursuit.
So you tell them to to defend
But they roll a natural 1
And fail to defend
So the ringwraiths are hand delivering the ring
What do you do
Do you hang up the hat and say you lose?
No
You have to modify the narrative structure you grew up with
And you can either improvise
Or you can make an outline or a guide
If you improvise, you chuck the 80 pages
Strider & hobbits decide to track down the ringwraiths, here's what you're going to have to ace and you take the cues they give you and you run with it (this is what I do)
You loosely follow the narrative structure where there's raising stakes
But she doesn't do this
She's a control freak so she borrows heavily from the 3 act structure
And creates an outline with all of those scenes
And builds in the scenes to have success and failure as an option
But she still wants to be flexible and say "session 3 is when the key event happens and that’s when they are too involved and eyeballs deep and by session 6 we're at the midpoint"
But that won't work because your players may dilly-dally in Rivendale for a while
And you have to roll with it and fill out the rest of it later
Or they may skip the whole thing and remember the eagles
And you're going to save the awesome dwarven dungeon for another campaign.
By borrowing from traditional narrative structures that are fun to run and fun to play in because they aren't railroaded to hell
And in that one you learn about 3 dimensional characters that are quirky, you learn how to craft descriptive language so you can use the paintbrush of your words to bring this world to life
You have concepts of theme and motif and you can create scenarios from the universal cycle
And what's your campaign is all about look at the theme what's the main message is it love conquers all?
If you're a writer, be a GM because it's fun.