Envision Your Revision
Creating a Manuscript Revision Plan
Today’s Shelf Life is about revising your manuscript; well, specifically, it’s about creating a detailed revision plan for your manuscript. Revision is something I know a lot about because (A) I’m a great editor and (B) I’m a terrible writer. So I revise my own work and others’ often.
I’ve written about revising before—in Attack Your First Revision and Visions and Revisions, namely—and both of those touched on the aspect of revision that is the revision plan. Today’s topic is specifically the revision plan and less the assessment of the first draft and the actual execution of the revision plan. That’s how this article is ever-so-slightly different than those that came before. I recommend reading all three if you’re about to buckle down and revise something (or wondering if you ought to).
Writers usually have to revise writing at some point because most of us don’t put down exactly what we meant to say, exactly how we meant to say it, on the first go. Some people do; and good for them. They don’t need this article. For everyone else, there’s Shelf Life.
Sometimes people say: Everyone’s first draft is terrible. I say this sometimes, too, but it’s an oversimplification. First, not everyone’s first draft is terrible; sometimes people write a very clean first draft. I myself occasionally write a very clean first draft of like three whole words in a row. But anyway, again, speaking for most of us: The first draft isn’t terrible. The first draft is just unfinished.
Saying a first draft is terrible is akin to saying the framing of a house is terrible. I admit it does look like a pretty crummy dwelling if you’re comparing it to a finished house—but why would you do that? It’s not a finished house. It doesn’t have walls and floors and shingles and toilets and stuff. It’s just the foundation and the skeleton. You can’t compare it to a finished house and judge it terrible by that standard. Like imagine holding up an acorn and yelling, “Look at this ridiculously poor excuse for an oak tree!”
The frame of the house has to go up first to put the structure of the house in place before you start building the walls and ceilings and floors. Then after you build those you can come in with the paint and carpet and fixtures and appliances. You can’t rock up to undeveloped land with a refrigerator and a can of paint, like what are you going to do with those if you don’t have walls and a kitchen yet? And what do you attach the walls to if you didn’t put up any studs? You have to go in order.
The first draft of most manuscripts is, hopefully, that complete foundation and frame job. You’ve poured the slab so the whole thing has a rock solid base to stand on, and then you’ve roughed in and framed the whole story. All the elements the story requires to exist have been painstakingly scraped out of your brain and onto a piece of paper The whole story, from once upon a time to the end. It doesn’t have to be pretty, or finished—the structure just has to be whole and complete.
That’s your first draft. The whole story, but a rough-in of it, essentially. During writing you might feel like it’s detailed, finished, and polished—but for the vast majority of writers that’s not the case. If you think your first draft came out of your brain at a publication-quality level, you need to figure out whether you’re one of the very few lucky ones for whom that is true or one of the many more ones of ordinary luckiness who are fooling themselves about the quality of their first draft.
For what it’s worth, I’ve never laid eyes on a first draft that was ready for press time. But I shan’t say unequivocally that they don’t exist.
Now you have a first draft. Now what? Time to make a plan for how you’re going to revise into the ultimate final draft that is ready to go out into the world and astonish its readers.
Before you begin revising—before you even begin your revision plan in earnest—I think it’s a good idea to sit on the manuscript for a while and get some distance from it. Write something else. Do something else creative. Read a really engrossing book or three. Something to get your head out of your own story and your story out of your head. Before you do that thought—before you shove it in a drawer for a while and try to forget all about it—do write down anything you already know you will need to work on in revision. There are probably a few weak spots in your first draft that you already know about. Go ahead and write those down. Then stick your manuscript in a drawer. Bookmark this article and come back in three weeks to six years.
As I’ve said before, the next step (after waiting for a while to get some distance), is to reread your manuscript as objectively as you can. This reread will form the foundation of your revision plan. Your revision plan will be built upon your understanding of your own text as you reread it. The reread is the rock upon which you will build your church. In case the metaphor got too confusing, the revision plan is your church. Your bible, anyway.
While you’re reading, keep two questions for yourself at front of mind:
Where does this manuscript accomplish your storytelling goals?
Where does this manuscript fall short of what you hoped to accomplish?
It’s unlikely you didn’t do anything well in the first draft. Don’t skip over the parts you did well looking for the parts you did poorly. You can learn a lot about how to improve the parts that can use improvement by looking at the parts that don’t need improvement and figuring out what your strong suits are.
John Wiswell, of whom I am a big fan, once tweeted something to the effect of, “the words in your head are always way better than the words that end up on the page.” It was a huge relief for me to read that because I thought it was just me—no matter how good a scene or paragraph is in my head, once I put it down on paper it’s just very lackluster compared with the concept in my mind.
There’s often a deficit between:
What you wanted to say and how you wanted to say it; and
What you said and how you said it.
This is normal. Don’t panic. The revision phase is your opportunity to close that gap between intention and execution so your manuscript represents the story in your head as faithfully as possible. To that end, let’s make some lists.
The Good
The good is a list of everything you’re keeping; the things that require no overhaul and may only need light editing or wordsmithing. These can be anything from the big-picture, structural elements (“the pacing is good!”) down to the smallest elements possible (“my word choice here was sublime”). As I said earlier, you can address a lot of your weaker writing by assessing your stronger writing to see what you’re good at. Do you lean too much on exposition, but your dialogue is cracking? Move some of the exposition to dialogue. Do you struggle with action scenes but do excellent description? Break your action scenes down to a series of stage directions and then describe them.
Make a list of the parts you like, that you feel need little or no revision, and that you want to keep. Further, as you make this list, look for patterns. Is one character or setting particularly well developed compared with the others? Are some parts particularly tightly plotted? If you’ve done one element really well, then other elements of that nature that aren’t done as well will stand out more to readers—have you ever read a book with mainly well-developed characters and then a character who just feels like the author wasn’t interested in them at all and just put them in because they needed someone to punt the plot down the line?
Figure out what you’ve done well so you can make sure all the elements of the same type are done just as well and see where elements of other types that aren’t as strong could be replaced with something that is a strength.
The Bad
The bad, conversely, is a list of the things that you can identify as done less well than you want. They need not actually be bad. It’s not a list of bad things. It’s a list of things that don’t live up to your own expectations for your writing. Characters who could be rounder. Dialogue that could be livelier. Transitions that could be smoother. Plotting that could be tighter. Anywhere you’re going, “this was better in my head” goes on your to-revise list.
This will likely be your longest list.
The Unsalvageable
Here’s the part nobody wants to think about. Some parts of your manuscript may not be salvageable. There are likely parts that will need to be cut—either because they don’t serve the plot/story and were initially included for some other reason or because whatever they’re doing to serve the plot/story could be executed in a completely different and better way. Like if you’re JRR Tolkien and you’re looking back at your first draft and you’re like, “man, they really could have taken the Great Eagles to Mordor, couldn’t they?” and then you have to throw out all of Book II and like two-thirds of Book III.
Whole scenes, subplots, and characters might turn out to be unsalvageable. Maybe you needed a villain and the one you came up with just isn’t very good. You still need a villain in that role, but the one you wrote might be unsalvageable. You might need to throw the whole villain out and start again. Maybe there’s redundant journeying, maybe you felt like you were running short of story and added filler while you were writing—now is the time to cut ruthlessly anything that doesn’t serve.
Don’t delete it! I always have a folder called “Discard Pile” handy when I’m doing a revision and anything I clip out of the manuscript goes into that folder, organized in some way that will make the discarded pieces easy to find. You may find you need to put them back in later, or consult them for important elements that have been excised, or review them before writing new content to plug the holes they left.
The Missing in Action
Finally, you should be auditing for things that are missing in your first draft. There will probably be a lot of them. Reasons—why characters do things, why things happen. Explanations. Motivations. Your main characters probably have these on display but do your supporting characters have them? Do your settings feel real and populated by people? Or do they feel empty and static like a cardboard backdrop? Whole characters might be missing—you might realize you threw a new character into the mix during act three because you needed a role filled, when you really should have introduced them much sooner.
Look for anything that is missing—anywhere a reader may not have enough detail to make the right inference; anywhere the reader will have to guess when you want them to know; and anywhere you’ve created unintentional ambiguity.
You will now have four lists—three to address, the items that need revising, them items that need removing, and the items that need to be drafted and inserted; and one list of items done well that you can use as a reference. In my considered opinion, a person with three separate to-do lists can do anything.
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