I've always greatly benefitted from showing my outline/beat sheet to screenwriters before I start drafting. They have an intuitive sense of story structure that allows me to tease out weaknesses in the story before I start writing. Along that line, knowing the genre conventions is super-important, because then you know what the audience is expecting (and ways you can subvert those expectations)!
Also, I feel like authors tend to fall neatly on the side of plot-bias or character-bias. I just finished reading a story with moderately interesting characters, but the story itself kind of meandered about until everything resolved in the last hundred pages. On the flip side, I tend to sacrifice character for plot, which means my later drafts are basically me going through and inserting character motivation and dimensions to characters that are initially very sparse.
I've always greatly benefitted from showing my outline/beat sheet to screenwriters before I start drafting. They have an intuitive sense of story structure that allows me to tease out weaknesses in the story before I start writing. Along that line, knowing the genre conventions is super-important, because then you know what the audience is expecting (and ways you can subvert those expectations)!
Also, I feel like authors tend to fall neatly on the side of plot-bias or character-bias. I just finished reading a story with moderately interesting characters, but the story itself kind of meandered about until everything resolved in the last hundred pages. On the flip side, I tend to sacrifice character for plot, which means my later drafts are basically me going through and inserting character motivation and dimensions to characters that are initially very sparse.