Working in Stages–A Guest Blog from Karen Wiesner

An outline is an author’s skeleton foundation. The first draft is a solid layer on top of that (kind of like the flesh and blood of your story). The refining after that point is the layer of richness that turns a diamond in the rough into a sparkling diamond.

If you don’t work in separate stages, you may find your story nowhere near as polished as it could be and you’ll ultimately do more work than you ever needed to. My suggestion to you is to try working in completely separate stages. When you complete the NaNoWriMo, you may have the urge to immediately jump into revising the book—maybe because you didn’t start with an outline and now realize what you have didn’t quite work the way you’d hoped. DON’T DO IT—INSTEAD SET THE BOOK ASIDE AS LONG AS YOU POSSIBLY CAN. I promise you won’t regret it.

I believe a book is best if you give it time to “breathe” between these stages. Completing a project has such natural stages, and each of them requires a different mind-set. If you really think about that, it can amaze you. Imagine the process of outlining, the process of writing, of revising… It’s only logical to complete the stages separately, interspersed with another project or even several other projects, allowing each story to breathe between those stages…and to allow you to get in the mind-set needed for the next stage in development. Also, it’s as if you’re coming into the work brand new. After allowing your projects to sit for a couple of weeks—or even months—you to have a fresh perspective. You’ll be able to evaluate if the story is really as solid as you believed it was when you finished it. This will also allow you see more of those connections that make your story infinitely cohesive. All writers get too close to their outlines or manuscripts to really see them objectively. Distance gives you that objectivity and the ability to read your own work like you’ve never seen it before.

Another reason for setting projects aside between stages is that writers always reach a point where their motivation runs out, and they may simply want to get away from the story as fast as they can. Of course they won’t want to write a book they’ve just spent weeks or even months outlining, nor do they want to revise a book they’ve just finished writing!

With every single book, I get to rock bottom and I’m convinced that if I ever see the manuscript again, I’ll tear it to shreds. Setting it aside between the various stages the project goes through really gives me back my motivation (and love!) for it in spades. I’m always amazed at how much better I can face the project again when I haven’t seen it for a couple weeks or even a month or more. I fall in love with it again. The next stage in the process becomes easier, too, and that helps my writing to be much better.

Also, the more books I have contracted, the more I seem to need these breaks in-between stages. I need breaks even when I feel a project isn’t working. If I put it on a back burner for an extended period of time (as long as I can possibly allow and still meet my deadlines), amazing things happen over the low flame. By the time I return to it, I find myself bursting with new ways to fix the problems I couldn’t resolve when I was too close to, and sick of, the project.

Now that you’ve completed the NaNoWriMo challenge, you’ve accomplished a lot. But if you want to see how well you’ve actually done, you need to get away from the project for as long as you dare. A month from now, two months, even three, you may come back to it and find yourself very pleasantly surprised because the feelings you left this book with are no longer uncertain or negative. Even if you discover you’ve got a lot of work ahead of you, you should have a fresh perspective now to begin the revision process with energized ideas that can fix the problems.

Take a break! In the most basic sense, a writer’s creativity is like soil. If you don’t allow it to rest, it can’t stay fertile—it can’t grow anything but tired and unproductive. Take regular breaks from your writing in order to keep the soil in your brain fertile.