How to Read Your Own Writing
Revision and Self-Editing for Authors
I can’t speak for anybody else, but I’m the if-I-knew-the-correct-answer-I-would-have-wrote-it-the-first-time type. I became this type, in part, because I grew up with undiagnosed ADHD and I have never for one moment in my life had the patience to go back over a test and read the questions a second time.
In my elementary school—maybe this was common, I don’t know—if you finished an exam before the time was up you would turn in your test and then you had to put your head down on your desk until time was up. I guess this was to make sure you weren’t disruptive or helping anyone cheat. I was usually the first student to turn in my test and the teacher would helpfully ask “Do you want to check over your answers since there’s time left?” Lady, no, I would rather be tortured than read those test questions again. I want to put my head down on my desk and take a nap till time’s up. If I knew the answer, I wrote it. If I didn’t know the answer, I guessed. My work here is done. Leave me alone.
The truth is that, sometimes, reading the test questions again will cause you to remember an answer you had forgotten the first time through. Sometimes in life, as you read your test questions, the text of a later question on the exam will reveal the answer to an earlier question—that’s a freebie. There is value in going back over your test if there’s time left. It’s just not something I am able to do without a little help from my amphetamines.
Naturally, I feel this way about reading and editing my own writing as well. I believe that if I could have written it better, I would have written it better the first time around. This belief is false and likely has arisen from a natural human impulse to get out of doing hard work. In reality, almost all writing—if not all writing—can be improved by the author’s revision. At some point the author must stop the revision cycle and move on to later stages of editing, like beta reading, development editing, copyediting, and so on. But this does not necessarily mean the author could not revise their story further. Perhaps they could not. Perhaps they could. In my experience many authors keep on revising until you tell them their book is on the physical printer and no more changes are possible.
It can be really hard to read your own writing with a critical eye. Even if you are highly self-critical (“my writing is terrible!”) it’s difficult to look at your own creation and see where it is lacking and where it can be improved. I find that I get caught up reading my own stuff, reminded why I wrote it the way I wrote it, and while I may make small wordsmithing changes here and there, major revision is difficult. It’s hard to see where big changes are needed.
Today I’m sharing three strategies for reading your own work for revision. I’ve used all of these on short- and longform manuscripts to help distance myself from the work enough to actually dig in and revise. I recommend choosing the strategy that’s right for the type of revision/edit you’re doing, or else progressing from the first strategy through the second and then the third if you want to try all three, because they are organized to find the biggest stuff first and the smallest stuff last.
Synopsize It
I love analyzing. Who doesn’t love analyzing stuff? This is a great method for reviewing your manuscript at a high level for big-ticket items like plot, pacing, and characterization. This method also involves making lists, which I absolutely love. Making lists and analyzing stuff? Count me in.
Start with a fresh sheet of paper and pencil or pen, or a fresh Word document, or even an empty Excel spreadsheet if you’re feeling particularly nerdy. You’re going to break your manuscript down scene by scene and make sure each scene is doing the work it needs to be doing. If you have scenes that aren’t pulling their weight, this will find them.
Starting with chapter one, scene one (or skip the chapters and go right to scenes if you don’t have chapters, as in a short story), make a brief—one sentence—synopsis of what happens in the scene. In this one-sentence synopsis, try to indicate which characters are present, where they are, and how the status quo changes during this scene. Really try to keep it to one sentence, even if it’s a long or awkward sentence.
You can capture additional or more-granular information about each scene as you go if you feel it will help you in this task. You might want to collect information like:
Which plot(s) or subplot(s) does this scene support?
Which character arc(s) does this scene support?
Where does this scene take place?
Who is in this scene?
What is the status quo at the start of the scene?
What is the status quo at the end of the scene?
It’s up to you what you collect. The main idea is to synopsize each scene in one sentence. Anything else is extra.
Read each scene quickly, without stopping to edit or revise (counterintuitive, I know) as you are creating your inventory of scenes. You may want to do just one chapter at a time for longer projects, as this can feel a little tedious and overwhelming.
Once you have the full inventory for whatever project you’re analyzing, string your synopses into one long synopsis of the project and read it. Do you have a coherent synopsis? Are there parts that jump out at you like, “Why would a writer include this in the synopsis, this isn’t important”? If so, that’s a scene for the chopping block. Do you find yourself asking questions like:
Wait when did this character get here?
How did they get to this location?
Why are they doing this action?
Why did events happen in this order?
You have a scene that could use some work. Use what you learn from your metasynopsis to go back and revise the scenes you flag as needing work and—if you have the stomach for it—cut out scenes that don’t serve the plot.
Read It Backward
By far the weirdest tool in my toolbox. “How do you read backward, like hold it up to a mirror?” No: Start at the end of your manuscript and read each paragraph start to end, beginning with the final paragraph, and then the penultimate paragraph, and so on, until you reach the start of the material you’re editing.
This is a great way to narrow your focus to your prose without getting distracted by big-ticket items like plot, pacing, and characterization—kind of hard to follow the plot backward. This allows you to pay attention to the quality of prose, grammar, mechanics, effective word choice, and generally making sure every word counts and language is used as effectively as possible.
In my experience, this is one of the most effective ways to remove filter words and (“saw,” “thought,” “felt,” “heard,” et cetera) and filler words (“just,” “even,” “really,” other “-ly” adverbs, and so on) from the text. They jump right out at me when I’m going through the text backward rather than forward—because I’m not distracted by the plot.
If tackling a whole novel backward sounds impossible, use the analysis tactic from earlier to attack one scene at a time. If you really want to distract yourself from the plot, try working through your scenes, backward, in random order.
Read It Aloud
This is the tactic for when you think—when you’re sure—you’re done revising and there’s nothing more you can do for this manuscript. You’ve done the above strategies, you’ve revised, you’ve proofread, you’ve revised some more, and now you’re sure it’s perfect. Get ready to hear how wrong you are.
Read your manuscript out loud. Or, if you don’t want to or can’t or don’t like the sound of your own voice, use a screen reader to read it to you. Siri or Alexa would be happy to help. You can get the Speechify extension for your Chrome browser and it’ll read you anything. You can connect it to your Google Drive and have it read your manuscript to you. If you use Microsoft Word, there’s a built-in “Read Aloud” tool on the Review ribbon. There are very few excuses not to do this. The internet makes it so easy.
Hearing your work spoken aloud to you is revelatory and can turn up tons of awkward phrases, stilted dialogue, and poor word choices that are easy to miss when reading your own work. You naturally read your own work in the same voice with which you wrote the work. Every time you read it in your head, that’ll be the voice you use. Your mind will gloss over places where the phrasing is awkward because you hear it as you intend it to sound rather than how it sounds. Hearing it in any other voice—even a computer’s voice—will make these instances plain.
I hope one or several or all of these revision techniques will be helpful for you as you embark upon your revision quest. Whether you love revising or hate it, every author has to do it to be successful. So you may as well be as good at it as possible.
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