…is advancing into the sketchy, magic-happens-here part of the outline.

I outline only in broadest terms, mostly to get the pacing down and to get an idea of the slice of time…
This doesn’t always work: sometimes an incident turns up that skews your timeline.

The worst thing a writer can do for himself is to follow the outline when the people in the story are saying “but…” and trying to do something else.

But outlines are necessary, I think: when I was a novice writer I wandered through the terrain and then threw out fifty page chunks as irrelevant until I pared the stack of pages down to a novel. Now I have a sort of a plan and a destination, but I always stay alert to other possibilities along the way.

The problem is conventions and, well, life.
Go to a convention, spend the weekend with people asking you about the book you did two years ago, or twenty, and you have to reconstruct that logic flow to answer; or you’re on a panel talking about concepts that belong to a book twenty years back. Or you party a bit, and drop a few stitches there. You get back home, travel-lagged, or just tired; and you sit down Monday or Tuesday morning trying to gather up the thirty or forty threads you were managing. But you only have half a dozen people you’re managing. Thirty or forty? Oh, yes…because every person has several irons in the fire, every person has a history and connections that can be in play, and you have to respect those, because if you don’t watch it, a missed thread can hand you an anomaly, and an anomaly can need to be handled, and handling it to explain how this happened (rather than ripping out 20 pages) can add 20 pages…

These things frequently happen post-convention, post trip, post-life-event, like, oh, having to paint the garage or replace the furnace…

The beat do go on. But that outline will help finding those threads a lot easier. So that’s mostly what the outline is, less WHAT happens as what HAS to happen, logistically, for things to get done, and what plot threads everybody is carrying, and why they have to be on-scene or off- and whose plans are apt to get overturned if X happens, and whether or not they get the clues and where…

Oh, a novel outline is SO not quite the orderly A. B. C. that Ms. Smith taught in 8th grade English.