Attack Your First Revision
Blitzing Your Draft Effectively and Efficiently
I like to think I write Shelf Life in a charmingly disorganized manner, which is why you got the article on finding beta readers first, followed by an article on completing your draft, and only now an article on how to tackle your first revision. There’s no rhyme or reason to the order of topics. Every time I sit down to write, I open my spreadsheet of topics and throw a dart at it to pick one. I’ve destroyed several monitors in this endeavor. Send help.
Perhaps you have completed the first draft of your novel. If you have, congratulations are in order. This isn’t easy to do. Most people live their whole life and never do it. You’re in the company of all history’s great authors—the group of people who have written a complete manuscript.
Perhaps you realize your first draft needs some work before it’s ready to go out into the world and start meeting readers. This puts you in an even more select group, because a lot of people from the above group complete their manuscript and decide not to do any revision or editing and either never let it see the light of day or self-publish it as-is.
I mean no disrespect to anyone who chooses that path. There’s nothing wrong with deciding you’re done working on something, you’re not going to work on it anymore, and you just want to put out what you’ve created. As long as you have a realistic understanding of the quality of the work you’re putting out and realistic expectations about the reaction and uptake you’ll get—go for it.
If you want to take your manuscript farther than that, read on.
Before you start lining up alpha readers, beta readers, sensitivity readers, editors, proofers—you’re going to need to make revisions. Every manuscript can use at least one round of solo reflection and revision before the author starts bringing in additional helpers for outside perspective. There are lots of approaches to writing. Some writers are wordsmithing and carefully crafting each sentence as they go. That’s the Georges Seurats of writing. Some writers are haphazardly splashing words onto the page as they go. Those are your Jackson Pollocks. Both of these approaches end in a manuscript that needs author revision. The Seurats might need fewer revisions to get to “done” than the Pollocks; then again, they may not.
I’ll tell you up front, I’m an authority on revising other peoples’ manuscripts but much less experienced in revising my own. That’s mathematical reality. I can only write so many manuscripts but the stream of manuscripts coming to me never dries up. I’ve revised a few of my own. I have some thoughts. My main thought is, revising is harder than drafting. Way harder.
As a schoolkid, teachers would hand me a test and I’d answer all the questions and flip my paper over and put my head down and then the teacher would say, “Catherine, don’t you think you should use this time to check your work?” Lady, no. I never check my work. If I didn’t know the answer the first time I looked at it, I’m not going to know the answer the second or tenth or fiftieth time I look at it. If I knew the right answer, I would have written it down the first time.
When I was younger, I took a similar approach to writing. I did it the best I could on the first try. There was no need to go back and review what I did and change it. If I genuinely believe that I chose every word, executed every sentence, and pulled the entire plot and story together in the best way I am capable of doing the first time I did it, then there is no point in going back through it and making changes. Maybe someone else can improve my work, but I cannot.
That’s not a realistic understanding of how writing works. Well, either that or I was just a better writer when I was younger than I am now. Which I don’t think is true. Writing isn’t like athletic ability, it doesn’t peak young and then wane with age as your body wears out. Writing improves as you age—you gain writing experience, absorb more of others’ writing and storytelling, you build more understanding of life and the world around you to draw ideas from. Creativity is like a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it gets.
Two things can be true at the same time. For example,
When I wrote this manuscript, I did the best work I was able to do.
In reviewing the finished draft, I can find things to improve.
They don’t contradict each other. Acknowledging that you can improve your manuscript in revision does not mean you’re admitting you did a bad job when you wrote it. Believing that you wrote the best manuscript you could while drafting does not mean that you can’t improve it during revision.
This process will be quicker, easier, and much less painful if you accept that finding weaknesses in your manuscript during revision and then improving them does not diminish the grand achievement of having completed a draft. Untangle your ego from your writing before you start revising. Nothing curtails the revision process like getting frustrated because your draft is not as good as you wanted it to be.
Okay, enough prattle. Herewith, my four-step process for tackling that nasty first revision head on.
Step One: Shove Your Manuscript in a Drawer
Right in a drawer. Do this the moment you add “the end” to the last page. Maybe you will feel relief that the giant undertaking of the first draft is now behind you—good. No problem. Have a glass of champagne and do something mindless to celebrate. Maybe instead you feel a tremendous burst of motivation resulting from your success, and you want to harness it to dive right into the revision. Don’t do that! If you discover a wellspring of creative energy, use it for anything else. You need to put emotional and mental distance between yourself and your manuscript before you start revising.
Close the file and put it under lock and key. If you wrote on paper, put your manuscript in a physical drawer. If you wrote digitally, close the file and put it somewhere out of sight. Make a folder for your finished draft and put a do-not-open-till date on it. Your manuscript is a delicious meal coming together in a slow cooker. Have you ever used a slow cooker? Look, as a white lady of a certain age this is something about which I feel very informed. Once you put all the ingredients in the slow cooker and turn it on, you do not open that lid to check on it. Every time you open the lid, the temperature of the slow cooker drops ten to fifteen degrees and you have to add approximately thirty minutes to your overall cooking time. Your manuscript is that food. Don’t open the drawer. The drawer is the slow cooker. This is the middle-age-white-ladiest metaphor I have ever written.
One more cooking metaphor, from your friend Catherine who never, ever cooks: When you put something on the back burner of your stove, you’re still cooking it. You’ve moved it out of the way so you can actively work on something else, but the back-burnered pot is still simmering. Your mind works like this, too. When you move something out of your “actively working on this problem” brainspace and put something else in there to work on for a while, your mind keeps working on the first thing in the background. That’s a different part of your mind that handles problems in different ways than your conscious mind does. You still make progress on things that are on your brain’s back burner. Sometimes you can only resolve a problem by letting it sit on the back burner a while before returning to it.
What I’m saying is, you need to put the manuscript away for a bit to get mental and emotional distance from it and also to let other parts of your brain work on the manuscript.
How long do you need to leave it in the drawer before you take it out and work on it? That depends on how much time you have. If you have a deadline, self-imposed or otherwise, you might need to get cracking on your revision sooner. If you leave it too long, you might lose interest in the project and your mind could move on to something else. It’s a good idea to let your manuscript sit, out of sight and out of mind, for two to four weeks before you pick it up again, but that’s an arbitrary number I made up that worked out fine for me.
Actual advice: Leave it sitting for as long as it takes you to feel creative again and write something else. It doesn’t have to be another whole novel, but write something. Write a short story, or a chapter of something bigger, or an outline for a totally new idea. Just get yourself jazzed about something separate and different from the monster you just completed.
Step Two: Read Your Manuscript Beginning to End
When you’ve gotten some distance, it’s time to read your manuscript for the first time. This is the funnest part of the revision stage. Even if you wrote your entire novel all in one go in a few weeks (a thing I have actually done), you’ll find things you forgot about. Some of the writing will surprise you by being better than what you expected. Some of it will make you cringe. You’ll notice things you didn’t notice while you were writing. You’ll see mistakes, places you could have done better, things that aren’t working.
Don’t fix them.
Have a separate document or notebook handy and make notes while you read. Don’t use your software’s comment feature to annotate the original draft or a copy of it. Use a totally separate document. This will help you focus on big-picture items and stop you from making edits and fixes on the fly. This is not the time to correct typos. If you’re in a separate document making a bullet list of things to fix, writing down minutiae like “page 12, paragraph 2, line 3: “it’s” should be “its”” will get old fast. Ignore that stuff. It’s not important right now.
In your separate document of notes to yourself, make some broad headings:
Pacing—slow areas where the writing bogs down, uneven pacing scene to scene, jarring transitions
Characters—flat characters, multiple minor characters who could be condensed, characters who show up late and should have been introduced earlier
Plot holes—anything plot-related that isn’t tied up tight; anything you hinted at anywhere in the manuscript but didn’t fulfill
Worldbuilding—watch out for too much, look for opportunities to world-build without using exposition; find instances of expository worldbuilding and make note to change them
Dialogue—unrealistic dialogue, confusing dialogue tags, uneven voice, characters with similar voices
Miscellaneous—note of good sentences, exciting scenes, best dialogue exchanges, and so on
Write down everything you think of while you’re reading under the appropriate heading. Keep resisting that urge to start fixing. If you think of a great fix, put that in your notes and keep moving.
If you can swing it—if you’re working with infinite available time to devote to this process and no deadline—then you can split this step into two readings: Read once just to take everything in, then read again and start making your list of issues.
Step Three: Make an Action Plan
Finally! It is still not time yet to dive in and start making changes to that manuscript. I mean, you can do that. You might be effective, but you won’t be as efficient as possible. Your next step is making a plan of attack to address the items you came up with in step two. You might think that there’s no need to organize, because you went through the manuscript from page 1 to page 224 and your notes go in that order, so you can just start on page one and start revising, tackling each note as you come to it, until you’ve made it to page 224 and you’ll be done. That’s a linear approach and it’s not invalid but it’s not optimal.
I take a thematic approach. Look at the broad headings you have from your notes and consider that they can group together in a few ways: character and dialogue go together, as do plot and worldbuilding; pacing is its own thing.
Make a plan to attack the feedback from those groups in a single pass each. Plan a pass through the manuscript first to address your plot and worldbuilding issues, then a pass to address your character and dialogue issues, and then a third pass to address pacing. You can do it in any order that makes sense to you, but I like this order because:
When you address the plot, you’ll find that holes need to be fixed through revising character actions in the next pass.
When you address worldbuilding, you’ll add or remove exposition that changes pacing and you’ll also be finding opportunities to replace expository worldbuilding with dialogue in the next pass.
When you address characters, you may find yourself adding or removing scenes to flesh them out further, or putting characters into scenes they weren’t in before, which will affect scene transitions that you’ll tackle during the pacing pass.
I prefer this multistep approach over a linear one because if you move through your manuscript start to end, fixing things as you come to them, you’re going to waste a lot of time backtracking. You’ll find things on page 150 that need to be addressed on page 10. Now you’ve made a new change on page 10, and that could require changes on pages 11 through 149. Most of the time you can’t see something wrong on page 150, nip back to page 10, make a change on 10, and then jump back to 150 and keep going like nothing happened. A linear approach seems like the most straightforward, but ends up being the most convoluted. You’ll end up making more passes in the long run if you do it this way.
Step Four: Execute
You’d think diving in and starting to change your manuscript would be the hardest part, but if you did your preliminary work in steps one through three, then this one might just be easier than you were anticipating. One big decision remains to be made. Do you:
Work in your existing document, editing line by line? Or,
Work in a fresh document, rewriting each section based on your action plan?
Personally, I like to work in my existing manuscript document, but I’m an editor. I can’t possibly say how a non-editor would feel about it. If you did your first draft longhand, this is a great time to transition to a word processor. If you decide to work in your finished manuscript, make sure you version, version, version. Save a copy of your original, finished manuscript. Make a fresh copy for your first revision. Make a fresh copy each time you start a revision. And for the love of dog, if you clip out text, stick it in a discard document—don’t delete it forever.
That’s it, that’s everything you need to know to grapple with your first manuscript revision. Reading your old manuscripts got you bummed out? Remember, the first step to doing anything well is to be terrible at it for a while and keep doing it anyway. Persevere.
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