You can't write anything you want. Once you write that first chapter, then everything else is determined. You can write anything you want, but only one thing works.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
You can't write just anything. Your story needs structure.
Many first-time novelists end up rewriting their first two or three chapters, trying to get them 'just right.' But the point of the first draft is not to get it right; it's to get it written - so that you'll have something to work with.
With each book you write you have to learn how to write that book - so every time, you have to start all over again.
I know what I want to achieve in each book and the major points, but I don't plan right down to the chapters. I think that the characters write themselves in some degree.
If you do enough planning before you start to write, there's no way you can have writer's block. I do a complete chapter by chapter outline.
Books aren't written - they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it.
One writes what one can, or has to, write.
There is no other way of writing a novel than to begin at the beginning at to continue to the end.
One thing that worried me was how writers get categorized and so they end up having to write the same kind of book again and again. That is fine if it is what you want to do, but I would rather be locked in the trunk of my car with a weasel than write the same book every three years until I die.
If I'm writing and a chapter isn't coming, I just move ahead.