Sometimes this is what a play looks like

Normally I'm not much of a plotter, not in the first draft, anyway.  Once I find the starting point of a story I like to follow where it leads and it can be a surprise to me too to discover how it ends.  Further drafts will of course then require a great deal of reshaping, but I've learned the advantage of having a lot of raw material to work with even when much of it will be later tossed aside.

Not so the mystery play I'm working on.  The first draft was loosely plotted, enough to get me to the end, but when I tried to make headway on the second draft I kept getting stuck, not knowing what needed to happen next.  After reading Christopher Vogler's The Writer's Journey I decided to apply the steps of the Hero's Journey to each of my six characters (there were originally seven, but strangely one never seemed to enter into the other characters' journeys and so we'll see how the play does without her).  After identifying the key moments for each character I wrote them down on post-it notes and then arranged then and re-arranged them until I had this:

I have to turn this into what???

This is a level of plotting I've never attempted before, but when I wove together the journeys of these six different characters I discovered holes I wouldn't have otherwise been aware of until I had tried to write the scenes.  Instead I was able to iron out many structural issues before setting down a single word.

Well.  Now I just have to write the thing.