Writing Process (macro)

Ok so please keep in mind that I have never actually finished writing a novel. Due to a combination of fast development and a slow writing process, I've never even done the thing of getting like 125 pages into a story, finishing act 1, and thinking I wrote a novel. So there's that. But this is the process that got me a decent ways into the one of my current projects that I'm a fair ways into, and that has enabled me to finish short stories and such.
My process for getting started is almost too unstructured to be worth describing. I have an idea, usually prompted by a conversation or something I'm frustrated about in writing culture or in the fiction I'm reading, or more often a conversation about those frustrations. If you're ever seriously at a loss for story ideas, I strongly recommend grabbing a friend, ranting about an unsatisfying or problematic pattern in a genre you love until a way to circumvent it shakes loose, and then writing that. (YMMV if your writing isn't generally motivated by "I'll show them! I'll show them all!). For example, the novel I'm in the middle of, Pointlessly Contrarian, started in a novel writing class my senior year in undergrad. I was irritated by the requirement to start a new project, and by that time furious with expectations to "write what you know" that hinged on "what you know" being a stable, white, middle class, suburban, vaguely protestant, able-bodied upbringing with no real pain or complication except romantic​ difficulties. So I said "You want me to write what I fucking know? Ok, you get an urban, Neurodivergent, pagan teenage drug addict going to a public alternative school and growing up in a polyamorous family." It's not all that autobiographical. Carson, the protagonist, is a lot like me, but their circumstances are a fair bit different. I grew up poor, in a single parent/only child household, neopagan but with a chill Episcopalian mom. (Chill about the religion thing, not so much about other stuff). Carson has three parents, three siblings (for broad definitions of siblings), and in the part of upper-class that generally thinks of itself as middle-class, with the combined income from all three adults coming out to a little over 500,000 a year, which isn't as much as it sounds like when you're feeding and housing 7 people, 3 of them teenagers, but is still kind of a lot.
I was also super done with "teens with issues" stories where the problem was their family, and getting more attention and going to rehab solved everything, and with identity stories where the protagonist was only a minority in one way, and usually just wanted to be normal, unless they were gay. Also with gifted-kid stories that has radical acceleration and emphasized how the gifted kid was really just a normal kid. So that's where that came from.
My other active project came out of me accidentally having a good idea when responding to a sarcastic Facebook comment about how a lot of writers only bother with worldbuilding to justify the scantily clad women and describe the cool fantasy city. I came up with a cool looking fantasy city where most people are scantily clad, and came up with a lot of particulars very fast because I had a backlog of need to worldbuild something. Then I decided I wanted my protagonist to get to the city, so I could make a whole world, and I wanted her to be from a very different place. It's a thriving metropolis in a tropical rainforest, so I started her in a small town in the desert. I'd been sorta wanting a world where most people have magic on a bellcurve ability distribution, so I put that in, and my partner suggested elemental magic. I'll talk more in another post about how I worldbuild.
The next part of the process is to start writing it. I don't do a lot of planning at first, I just start. In a novel, I'm aiming to get the first chapter done (this could happen on day 1, or take months from when I start the story). In a short story it might just be the first few paragraphs. In an essay, it isn't usually the beginning, just whatever I feel the most strongly about or have the best idea of how to articulate; generally this will be like 300-500 words.
Then I outline. In a novel I do it by chapter, in a short story by scene, in an essay by section. 1 word to 1 sentence description of the most important or overarching thing in each part, then an in-order breakdown of events, then details if I have them, including lines that I've already thought of, where there are any.
So the part of a outline of a chapter might look like
Chapter 1 Mid September
    I.  Carson talking to their mom
        A. Conversation about Carson’s Hair.
        B. Conversation about Carson’s plans for the future.
        C. Something gets Carson thinking about self injuring.
    II.  Carson in their room, trying not to cut.
        A.  Contacts Dillon for support
            1. They suggest a distraction of some kind.
            2.  Carson decides to work on a beading project.
        B. Carson works on beading.
            1.  Ends up poking themselves repeatedly with the beading needle.
        C.  Gives in and cuts.
            1.  Some description of background as well as special knife.
            2.  Fairly detailed description.
            3.  Cleans up and bandages with obvious meticulousness.
        D. Takes an Adderal and an “extra” vicodin, and settles into reading a book for senior lit.  

At this stage, later chapter outlines will probably be a lot sketchier, often a list of scenes with few or no details, or even a list of events that I don't know how the scenes break down yet.
As I make progress, I fill in the outline with more detail, and edit it as plans change, and if I go back and change something, or write it differently than I expected, I modify the outline to reflect that. For novels, this goes in a separate Notes and Outline document. This generally has the following sections
*Outline
*Logistical Notes (schedules, distances between stuff, lists of books someone is reading)
*Worldbuilding Notes
*Pressing Questions (stuff I haven't figured out yet that I need to, like "Do onions exist", or "What music does Aurora listen to")
*Characters (block paragraph descriptions with important details including relationships. What I think is important is variable. Also this generally includes every named character even if they aren't important.)
* Bits and Ends (scenes, or single paragraphs and sentences, that I've written for chapters that are still a ways off).
*Sometimes there are other sections depending on the needs of the story, like if I need to be able to quickly refer to the details of how a thunderstorm forms.

For a short story, it generally goes at the top of the story document, and for essays I will usually build the story on top of the outline, expanding bullet points into paragraphs.
Everything gets updated as needed, which is a lot. Doing that counts as writing time, and substantial expansions count towards word count.
I don't usually do much editing on short stories until they're done. With novels, I like to go back and revise at least some of the previous chapters every so often, especially if I already know something substantial needs to change. This will be covered more thoroughly in a future post about revision.