Plotting on paper vs typing straight into the doc, paper keeps winning for me

I used to open a blank page and just let the story wander, but after 40k words of dead ends last spring I switched to index cards and a corkboard... now I outline every scene before I type a single word. The funny thing is I fought it for so long because I thought outlining would kill the spontaneity, but it actually freed me up to be weirder in the actual prose. My last short story went from 3 rewrites down to 1 draft plus minor edits, and that was a big shift. Does anyone else find that the physical act of moving cards around changes how you see the pacing, or am I just late to a party everyone else already knew about?

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