Writing Advice: Plotting, Buddhism and Marrying Millionaires

I’ve been seeking out writing advice for about 40 years at this point, and I’ve yet to find anything more succinct than that (reportedly) offered by John Gardner in On Becoming a Novelist: ‘Marry a millionaire who thinks you’re a genius.’
Sounds cute, but what Gardner actually says is this:

‘The best way a writer can find to keep himself going is to live off his (or her) spouse. The trouble is that, psychologically at least, it’s hard. Even if one’s spouse is rich, it’s hard. Our culture teaches none of its false lessons so carefully than it teaches that one should never be dependent.’

Not every writer gets to move in the 1% circles, of course, so even if you can overcome the whole dependence bit, Gardner’s isn’t the most practical advice you’ll ever get. Happily, writers tend to be quite generous when it comes to talking about their process, so there’s a whole world of tips and suggestions available to anyone willing to read author interviews.
One of the most common questions that comes up when I’m teaching has to do with plotting. Should the entire novel be plotted out in advance before we begin? Is it okay not to know everything in advance?
‘Not necessarily,’ and ‘Yes,’ are the answers to those questions, respectively, and especially if you’re George Saunders, who has just published the excellent Vigil and who had this to say on the business of plotting when discussing Lincoln in the Bardo in an Observer interview titled ‘How Buddhism Made George Saunders a Better Writer’:

“To answer truthfully, I don’t really do a lot of pre-deciding,” Saunders said. “It’s more like wading into it, trying to make good line-to-line energy, and then trusting that that will decide for you. So in this case, that weird form came out of a series of obstructions that I ran into, and then thinking, How can I do this without sucking? How can I avoid this move that I think is going to produce a boring text?”

Wading in, making good line-to-line energy, and not being boring: start with that and you won’t go too far wrong. John Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist, by the way, is aimed at “the beginning novelist who has already figured out that it is far more satisfying to write well than simply to write well enough to get published.” Which is you. Right?