Visions and Revisions

What’s Done Is Never Done

Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
—TS Eliot, from “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock”

Happy belated April 20 to those who celebrate. I was thinking of you yesterday. I guess Easter also happened so happy Easter to those who celebrate that, too. As an atheist I only celebrate secular holidays like Groundhog Day and the Preakness Stakes but I am always fascinated by the observances of others.

Today’s Shelf Life is a companion article to this past February’s When Rewrite Is Right and the previous February’s Attack Your First Revision. In the previous article, I talked about why you might want to rewrite instead of revise and I talked about how to know when you should rewrite and, when you sit down to rewrite, how to know what to keep and what to throw out. Today I am discussing an action plan for rewriting with specific how-tos to get you started if you’re looking at your 80,000-word manuscript and saying “you want me to do what?!”

Most people never write a novel-length manuscript in their life and I am sitting here telling you, a person who has written a novel-length manuscript, that you should maybe do it again. And I don’t even mean write a second novel-length manuscript, I’m saying you should maybe write the same one again.

I’ve referenced Kristin Cashore’s story of rewriting Bitterblue before, in December’s Reconstructive Surgery for Manuscripts, but I’m linking it again in case you didn’t read it the first time I shared it (or even if you did). Sometimes rewriting is the answer, even if you’re a multi-time New York Times bestselling author like Cashore. I would venture that Cashore didn’t rewrite Bitterblue before publication because she’s not a good writer; she rewrote Bitterblue because she is a good writer.

There’s more than one way to be “good at” something. If someone can write a draft (of a short story, novel, poem, screenplay, whatever) from start to end and it’s good the first time, without revision, then yay for them—clearly they are good at writing. Writing a draft that’s “just okay” or even crummy and then evaluating it critically, revising it painstakingly, and editing it carefully is also being good at writing. They’re just two different ways of being good at the same thing. (There’s a lot more than two ways.)

Today is all about creating the revision plan. Whether you’re going to grab a machete and start hacking away at a copy of your draft, or whether you are sitting down in front of a clean piece of paper (or screen) to start a fresh rewrite, you need to go into it with a plan. Herewith, guidance on how I make that plan. If you are undertaking this onerous task of rewriting or revising a piece of writing—and it is onerous even if the piece of writing is short!—then hop in, winner, and let’s go undertake together.

Make a Chart

The first thing I do when I’m planning a revision or rewrite is I make a chart. I love spreadsheets for ease of dragging rows around but you don’t need to use a spreadsheet. You can use any software that makes tables (Word or Docs, Evernote, Notion, OneNote) or just use a piece of paper or a page in a notebook. It’s a really simple chart: Three columns with a row for each chapter (or section) of your manuscript. 

Your column 1 should be narrow (wide enough for a 2-digit number) with the rest of the page width split evenly between columns 2 and 3. If you’re drawing this on a piece of paper or in a journal, make your rows tall so you can comfortably write a paragraph or two in each cell. You might leave a full journal page for each chapter. You don’t need to get more granular than the chapter level for a novel-length work—don’t worry, we’ll do that in the next section.

Column 1 is just going to have your chapter numbers going down the page: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, and so on, all the way to Chapter 99 or whatever is your last chapter. The heading of column 2 is “What Happened in the Draft.” When I’m making my chart, I read each chapter and write a brief summary of what happens in that chapter. As brief as possible. Like 50 words per chapter. A very high-level summary of what happened.

Column 3 will be headed “What Happens in the Revision” and we’re not going to fill it out yet. This column stays blank for now. As the rewrite plan takes shape, I start filling in the cells of column 3 with a brief summary of what will happen (or what happens, if I’ve already written it) in the revision. Important: These don’t necessarily map one-to-one with the summaries in column 2. Something that happened in Chapter 1 of the original draft might happen in Chapter 2 of the revision. Chapters might get added or taken away during rewriting. The chapter content does not have to stay parallel.

Anyway, once you’ve gone through your whole manuscript and briefly summarized what’s happened in each chapter, it’s time to move on to—

The Reverse Outline

That which fills writers’ hearts with dread. This is the part where you measure out your life with coffee spoons.

Note that you are not doing your reverse outline in or on the chart you made in the previous step. They’ll be two different documents. If you’re using a notebook for this, make sure to skip some pages before you start your reverse outline. Another option is to create a new landscape-oriented document (Word, Docs, or any other word processing app of your choice), create a three-column layout within that document, and paste a copy of your draft into the center column. Break your manuscript into scenes (ahead of time or as you go) using the # sign on a line by itself (if you haven’t already done so in the original manuscript). Okay: Now you’re ready to start the reverse outline.

Reverse outlining is the opposite process of outlining. When you outline, you write down the plan for your story by putting the essential features in order, leaving out the detail to be filled in later. When you reverse outline, you start with the text of your book or story and you go scene by scene and list the key details of each scene including:

• Which characters are present?

• How does it advance the main plot?

• How does it advance the subplot(s)?

• How does it develop the principal character(s)?

• How does it logically lead into the following scene?

I also make notes about specific items of interest, such as a new character or important object or idea that’s being introduced for the first time or called back to.

I mentioned a three-column setup with your draft in the center; the bullet items above are what you put in the left-hand column. The right-hand column is where you will put your analysis of what’s going on in the scene and how it serves the overall manuscript, taking into account the items in the left-hand column. If, from your notes in the left-hand column, you can see that this scene does not advance the plot or any of the subplots, you can use the right-hand column to make notes on what you could do to make this scene germane to the manuscript or whether it should be removed and the critical information within it rehomed.

While you might make some notes in the right-hand column as you go, you’ll also be using that column after you’ve completed the left-hand column for your full manuscript as you go back through and look for patterns. Was an important character, idea, or object introduced in the last 70 percent of the manuscript? Probably want to go back and introduce it earlier or ensure your foreshadowing is on point. Was one character missing for scene after scene after scene with no explanation and for no reason, you just kind of didn’t need that character for anything for a while? Then you probably want to go back and add some explanation as to where they were or why they were absent. Did you identify several scenes in a row where nothing really . . . happens? That’s a pacing problem announcing itself. Did you ask a question anywhere that never got answered? Start a subplot that never got resolved? The right-hand column, as you fill it in, becomes your map of big-picture issues.

The Revision Plan

Once my reverse outline is complete, I open up yet another fresh document or turn a fresh page in my notebook and make my revision or rewrite plan. This doesn’t need to have any fancy formatting, an outline or even a two-tiered bullet list is fine. I create my revision or rewrite plan by going through the right-hand column of my reverse outline and make a list of all the stuff I need to work on in the next version.

This needs to be organized in some kind of way that’s going to be usable, and that can depend upon your personal preferred method for attacking revisions in a manuscript. Maybe you want to knock out as much as you can in one round of revision, going slowly but attacking each scene from multiple angles at once. If that’s you, then your revision plan should be organized chapter by chapter, scene by scene, and list what you need to add, delete, and change in each piece of the manuscript. In my opinion, this method works best if you’re doing a full-on rewrite.

If you prefer to attach a revision in phases, moving quickly in a targeted strike on one aspect at a time—for example, a round for pacing; a round for characterization; a round for subplots; and so on—then your revision plan will be organized by type of change, so that all the changes related to pacing are grouped together and all the changes related to characterization are grouped together. This method (again in my opinion) works best when you are doing an intensive revision of your existing draft rather than a rewrite.

Either way, your revision plan is ready when you have listed all the things you’re going to address during your rewrite or revision process and they’re organized in a way that you feel confident you can go down that list of items like bing bing bing and just knock them out. When you’re sure you’re ready, then the next thing to do is—

Go Back to the Chart From the Start

Remember the chart with the empty column 3? Now is the time to fill that in. Beginning with Chapter 1 (or your prologue, if you have one), write a brief summary of the chapter—not the chapter as it is in your original draft (that’s in column 1) but the chapter as it will be in your finished revision or rewrite. This column captures your vision for the revision or rewrite. Using all the information and analysis you have created during this revision-planning process, you’re now going to go chapter by chapter down that third chart column and summarize the story.

Why are we doing this if we already have our revision plan? Why not just take the revision/rewrite plan and run with it? Why, to save ourselves heartache down the line, dear friend. Once you’ve filled in that column 3, there’s one more thing—an important thing—to do with it before we start the revision.

But wait, there’s an interim step. First: Take a break.

Let’s say you’ve completed your chart, your reverse outline, and your revision plan for this manuscript. They’re done. Is dotted and Ts crossed. Ready to roll. The best thing you can do for your upcoming revision or rewrite, in my opinion, is step away from this work and put your brain on another track for at least a few days. Write something else. Read a novel that’s completely different from your manuscript. Go occupy your brain with something that is not this manuscript for a solid several days at least.

Why? So this project can simmer on the backburner of your brain for a little while. I have talked about this before and I’m going to talk about it at length in its own article someday, but for now the main thing is, your subconscious brain works on problems differently than your conscious brain does. I think it’s always a good idea to let your subconscious get at a problem for a bit while you turn your conscious mind to something else. Whenever I do this, I come back to whatever the first thing was with new ideas and fresh perspectives. 

Okay. Break taken. Back to the chart!

The last step before you jump into your revision or rewriting process is to clear the draft out of your mind as much as you can (the break you took should have helped with that) and then just read down column 3 of your chart. You will be reading just the summaries of each chapter as you envision those chapters in your rewrite or revision. Do not read the summary of the chapter as it exists in the draft. Do not read the chapter itself. At this juncture you are essentially reading through that chapter-by-chapter summary of the rewrite you haven’t written yet.

This is where you ask yourself if that summary matches the vision you have in your mind for the next draft of your manuscript, if you missed anything important, if there’s anything extraneous that could come out. There is still time to tweak this summary and go back to your revision plan and add some more notes before you dive into the revision or rewrite itself.

There’s always more time, in fact, for revision and rewriting. Until we publish, anyway, that moment when human voices wake us, and we drown.

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