Tonic,
I have no idea how to put the accent on cliche, so I'm not going to try. Your piece that you posted on the critiques section really wasn't that bad, you know! I didn't realise that I would touch a nerve when I said it felt a bit cliche, but now I feel obliged to try and help again.
When I'm planning a piece, I will often only have a start point, or an end point, or in the case of my current dilemma a start and an end, but a missing 90 000 words in the middle! What I try to do is to bullet point the middle bit. I try to build a series of one liners that describe events that will progress the story towards the ending that I'm heading for. (My last novel was encapsulated on a single side of A4!) Once I have a suitable string of events, I then allocate a word count to each event, thereby giving me a target to aim at. Each section of the story is then like a separate story to me. It has a start - normally the point at which the last piece left off - and an end. Within my word target, I then allow sub plots to build as my imagination fills in the detail of each of the major events. Sometimes these sub plots affect the outcome of the major events in ways that I hadn't originally planned. If this happens, I generally re-plot the story from this point in the same fashion as I did the first time.
This technique allows you to have some structure and discipline, whilst allowing for flashes of inspiration. It has certainly led me down some paths that I didn't see coming in my writing! I hope you find this useful.
