Okay. Say you're a writer, working on a novel, short story, what have you. You're probably all ready to get set to writing your masterpiece story that you've been sitting on for years, so that you can expose it to the world at large, and you know exactly what you want of your story's beginning.
Now, stop.
Just take a moment before you set pen to paper or finger to keyboard. I'll tell you why: unless you've written something semi-professionally before, you probably also forgot one key part of a story - your plot.
There are many amateur writers I know of (myself included) who have forgotten this small but incredibly useful bit of pre-writing in their rush to get their more "complete" (disjointed and incomplete, in reality) ideas on to paper/screen, and their work has suffered for it. To use a personal example, I wrote fanfiction long before original fiction became an option for me, and one of my most favorite properties to write for was Metal Gear Solid (the Playstation classic, not the Gamecube bastardization). I was probably fourteen or fifteen at the time, and I was so enthusiastic about getting started on this wonderful idea of mine.
I'll tell you straight up that there were three equally disastrous mistakes that I made:
1) Chapter length and pacing:
At the age I was, I had NO clue what pacing even was. Sure I read books and knew that I loved reading certain longer chapters, but I didn't quite understand why I enjoyed them so much. But, there were also lengthy chapters that just dragged on almost endlessly that I didn't enjoy so much. The answer is quite simple to me now, but then, it wasn't so clear; the pacing of action was what made things either very appealing or very drab and boring.
To explain myself, pacing is generally how a writer splits action from exposition (or fluff as many call it). Sometimes, it's necessary to dedicate an entire scene or chapter to either action or fluff, and (again) I didn't understand the difference very well. To my young mind, I thought that action was almost everything a story needed to be successful, and thus, I set out on my adventure with that mindset. As it turns out, that was a massive mistake. What ended up happening was a rush of very short, and not very well-thought out scenes and chapters. And, while I was at it, I burnt myself out on writing action scenes and the like.
Now, if I had calmed myself down and thought about the project a little more, I would have noticed this flaw and corrected it through use of a few basic plot points, some quick twists, and that little bit of aging afforded me through actually setting a firm plot down. This would have told me, "hey look, instead of being a Rambo about things, keep to this path, and if you don't deviate too much you should have a decent short story." I say short because the total I came to in my project was a measly 13 chapters for a little more than 10,000 words.
Summary: plotting can help with pacing, and pacing helps with length.
2) Too little description of surroundings:
If my time in high school taught me much of anything besides 'hate the jock', it was that the right amount of description can make all the difference between a good story and a pile of events that don't quite fit well together. As a small (incidentally quite related) tangent, for one school paper, our English class was to write a gothic-inspired (think Poe-esque, but not quite so dark) short story. The secret to good gothic writing, as it turns out, is description and lots of it. This makes for a very exposition-heavy, very slow story, but also very eloquent at the same time.
Compare that to what I just said about my first fanfiction, the very poorly paced epic failure of mine. Between the two should exist a happy medium; between exposition and action, setting and confrontation. My fanfiction had a lot of the latter, and of course, my gothic piece had a lot of the former. It's actually rather easy to fall into the habit of getting into a rut in one or the other. But at the same time if you plot your story well, you can quite as easily avoid these habits, by setting points in which you force whether your characters are in conflict or not. You can also control flow with these plot points (i.e., ambushes and such).
3) Characterization and internal conflict:
In my fanfiction, I had very little of it. I had the mindset, 'everyone who reads this knows the characters, so why should I provide any internal conflict?' Big mistake, of course. Not only does conflict make your character the way they are, but it also proves an invaluable precedent for your character's thinking patterns - and as everyone should know, your characters CAN think for themselves through you. Especially if you do some character building and/or worldbuilding - more absolutely necessary pieces of the writing puzzle, in my opinion.
As important as internal conflict is however, general characterization and personification is still more important. For instance: your character is the most badass individual on the face of the Earth, and has no weaknesses. That, friend, is called a Mary Sue character, and is generally panned for being bad. Why bad? Because it's unbelievable. It needs to be believable or your reader will not attach themselves to the character, and thus won't care what happens to that character, no matter how heart-wrenching or what have you. So I say again: characterization and personification make up a good portion of what makes a good story.
How does planning the story account for this? Schedule in some internal conflict and some heart-to-heart style dialogue. The two work off of one another so easily that you might surprise yourself in learning what makes your character tick, so to speak.
So now you've got your plan for how your story is going to progress. You've got a great, sensibly believable cast of characters with their own agendas and beliefs. You've got a setting that pulls everything into a cohesive unit. All of this and more can easily be coaxed simply out of actually putting a little bit of thought into your plot, and this means that you're in prime position to put your epic masterpiece into motion and get to writing. And to that, I say happy writing, everyone.
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