This website is a resources for teachers of "gifted and talented" students - but, in my experience, this strategy absolutely will not work in a more general setting.
It's often the case that students aren't writing down the steps because they don't understand what the steps are and don't know how to formulate the steps as individual components (and may be answering the questions in unexpected ways!)
Making the questions harder will often make things worse, on its own, because the student will get stuck and demotivated and hard-questions-for-the-sake-of-being-hard will seem pointless to them.
I do use this as a strategy but only when I'm confident that the student has a very good understanding of what's going on.
If they're not writing down the steps, it's more often that they are demonstrating that they don't have a good enough level of understanding to do this. (This also applies to "gifted and talented" students)