Encouragement–A Guest Blog by Karen Wiesner

Never compare yourself or your output to another writer. You’re moving forward every single day and accomplishing something. That is productive.

Whether or not you completed an outline before you started the NaNoWriMo challenge, or you only have only a partial outline or guideline to work with, the act of writing can produce magical results. I consider my outline the bare bones of my stories. There’s little flesh on them until I start writing, and suddenly it’s like the flesh is being knitted over those bones right before my eyes, becoming solid…becoming alive. I remember outlining Renegade’s Rose and Undercover Angel, Books 6 and 7 of my Incognito Series. With both of these projects, I couldn’t finish the outlines, and both outlines were very sparse on details. I knew basically what I wanted to do with the stories and I gave myself scene-by-scene guidelines, but I couldn’t outline any part of the last several chapters for either project. I set these aside for as long as I could after the outlines were mostly complete. When I came back to them, I was able to fill in a few more of the holes I’d left gaping. But I still wasn’t able to complete the final scenes in either outline before I started writing. In both cases, that magical element that almost always takes place when writing a story happened. The characters became breathtakingly alive, the tension from the plot and relationships rose, and the situation began to unfurl clearly. In both cases, the holes closed up as I wrote (due, in part, because I knew the full course of the external plot conflict, internal conflict and goals and motivations, and they were cohesive) and I knew exactly how each book needed to end because I’d gotten to know the characters and story so well through the act of writing.

The act of having outlined a book should give you a very clear idea of your story, but this doesn’t always happen fully. Writing it will add another level of clarity, just as revising it will. Sometimes you have take a leap of faith by going ahead with outlining and writing a book even if you’re not 100% sure it’s all lined up for you to connect the dots. Remember, abandoning a book is the absolute worse case scenario. Most authors won’t do it unless they have absolutely no other choice. If a project takes several revisions or even overhauls, it just means you’ve thought it all through that much longer. There is no failure in setting a story on a backburner while your subconscious mind goes to work trying to figure out how to make it stronger.

http://www.karenwiesner.com