There’s no right or wrong answer to the question “Does a story need an outline?” during the writing phase. But when developmental editing begins after the story is completed, the outline is something the story must have.
Writing a blurb for another person is not as difficult as writing the blurb for your own book. One fellow writer even stated: “I don't even think authors should be doing it by themselves."
If you want to get the most out of social gatherings, you need to be a master of the elevator speech…or at least have several well-crafted elevator pitches ready to deploy.
When I first tried to write Flash Fiction it was a great challenge. All my previous writing attempts ended up as trilogies, so I was a bit uncertain as to how to actually write a story using so few words.