This is a fun chart to ponder.
A panster is someone who writes by the seat of their pants -- making things up as they go along. A plotter is someone who tries to figure everything out ahead of time about what they're intending to write. Therefore, a "plantster" is someone in the middle of those two styles.
For the first box, I had to look up "flashlight method". It refers to driving a car at night, where you "can only see as far as the headlights, but you make the whole trip that way."
I quickly gave up trying to apply a style to myself. I've pretty much used them all over 30+ years of writing. It depends on the story and how I'm feeling about it that sets the tone for how I write it. Overall, though, I lean more toward panster and less toward plotter. In fact, I'm rather appalled when I hear some writers say they won't write a single word until they know exactly what's going to happen before they start. To me, that seems so un-fun, in the way that editing is always my least favorite part. The story's already written, so there isn't anything fun about editing what already exists.
I only wrote a true outline once, and that was for my first S/H novel, Private Agendas. But I don't think I even finished the outline, because after a dozen chapters or so I wasn't sure how things were going to go, so I just started writing. It worked out okay.
I've always been intrigued by the idea of writing character bios for any new characters introduced, but I've never done so. If I'm at the point where I'm thinking a lot about new characters, then I'm already impatient to just start writing and see what happens. I probably use the panster method most when I'm doing a case plot in the "Adventure" series, since I don't need to worry about needing to recall details for a future story.
It did used to be common for me to know what the ending was before I started -- well, that's rather "duh" when writing first time slash stories, which I used to do a lot of across multiple fandoms. But one particular memory I have of writing up to a certain scene is "Compassion's Heart". I was a thoroughly chronological writer, and so it was very strange for me to start with a scene in the middle of the story -- Hutch waking up in the hospital after a horrible ordeal. But that scene was so intense in my head that I had to write it. So I did, and then wrote the rest of the story to get up to that scene. Turned out, that scene had to be completely re-written when I got there. That's why it didn't make sense to me to write out of order -- later scenes were no longer going to "fit" by the time I got to them.
The writing software Scrivener has made me bolder about playing with writing out of order, since it has devices to so nicely keep track of things. I made use of the index card feature and focused on writing one plot thread at a time a few stories back, and I think it worked out well, and I enjoyed writing out of my comfort zone. But the next story, I was back to writing notes on index cards after I'd written the scenes.
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