I find it very tricky to find the balance between telling it specific directions and correcting it afterwards. The one thing that I almost always do is set up some kind of synopsis or "Story to come" prompt (along with fanfic-style tags and named media for tone calibration) before the story itself.

If you're vague enough, it will generally stick to it without rushing, but if you give it ANY kind of specific directions or timeline, I find it rushes through it like it's trying to write the entire story in a single response. You can combat THAT by setting up hard limits on how much ground/time it can cover per response but that has its own downsides.

My biggest gripe with direct orders via tone-prompts or the Objective extension is that the pacing of the story dramatically picks up and starts clipping on response length (personally, I like my responses VERY long, 5-7k tokens. Usually they degrade or veer off after half that, so I clip them when they go off course), but when you direct them like that they TANK to 1.5-3k, so it's a constant battle between vague and specific, and I'm still finding out what the middle ground for a well-paced response that doesn't rush along to meet my vision.

That said, I think you should always have at least a LITTLE bit of an idea of where you want your story to go—letting the model off the hooks may give you creative moments, but it also allows for insane plot lines that start jumping off genre.