Figuring out how to revise

Revising is one of those things that some writers love and others hate. There are various reasons for this. Writers who love it are usually the ones that find fixing things easier than making them up. Writers who hate it come in a lot of varieties: the pantser who finds revisiting their work boring, the writer whose work sets up like concrete within ten minutes of typing it; the writer who leaves out all the tricky bits they didn’t know how to do, hoping no one will notice, and then finds that they need to go back and put them in anyway; the writer who stretched a little too far and now realizes they have to fix all the tricky bits that they aren’t sure they have the chops to handle.

The first thing both the love-it and hate-it writers need to realize is that revising is a collection of skills that can be learned. The second thing is that exactly which aspects to learn and how to go about learning them is going to be very different for everybody, depending on what they need to do, why they’re doing it, why they love or hate revising, and what their writing process was like in the first place.

Writers who produce prose that sets up like concrete, for instance, will need to figure out how to jackhammer their prose apart so as to slide the new stuff in as seamlessly as possible. They will also have to accept the fact that, to them, it may take years before the new stuff feels right, even though nobody else has a problem with it. For writers who skipped over important bits, how they set about revising depends on whether they left those bits out because they didn’t know how to write them, or because they hate doing something the missing bit will require (too bloody, too emotional, too many people present, too much of whatever the writer doesn’t want to write).

In all cases, learning involves practice. Sorry.

In addition, learning to revise depends on what kind of revision is required. Do you need to add a scene? Cut a scene and close things up? Delete or rephrase every use of “flirbil”? Remove two lines from every single page of the ms. (or from every page of dialog)? Do a thorough check for your own particular overused words/phrases/punctuation/syntax-and-grammar tics? (I recommend the last in all cases, just because, but it can be a good way of learning how to revise.)

There are a couple of tricks that can be helpful regardless of what one has to do and why. The first one is: change the appearance of the manuscript. Change the font dramatically and switch from page view to web view (or just change the margins so that the lines don’t break in the same places). It is amazing how much easier it can be to see something with new eyes when it actually looks different.

Then stop and think about what kind of revision the story needs, and the mechanical things it will require. Adding a new chapter or a new scene, whole and entire, is a different process from changing the pacing of the middle three chapters or punching up the emotional impact of a subplot that weaves through an entire book. Adding a scene needs a bunch of entirely new words, plus whatever edits need to be made to fit that scene into the narrative (which can be transition paragraphs to get into and out of the new scene, additional foreshadowing, additional follow-up as the effects ripple through, or all of the above). Clarifying a subplot or increasing its impact can require anything from a couple of new scenes to a string of minor alterations to a dozen different conversations, actions, or reactions. Pacing…well, pacing may need a post of its own, because what you do depends on whether it’s too slow, too fast, or too lumpy.

When the revision is about inserting explanatory information or foreshadowing that somehow got left out the first time, there are two approaches. One is to come up with a single new scene that provides everything that’s missing in one go, and the other is to sprinkle it through the existing text like breadcrumbs. Sometimes one is a better choice than the other; it depends on how central and/or how much of a revelation the new information is.

When I make this kind of change, my first step is to flag the exact scene in which the story stopped making sense because the information the characters and/or reader needed was missing/wrong/not-on-the-page. I flag that scene, and then I start working my way backwards through the manuscript. My goal is to flag as many possible places where the characters might have seen or done or said (or, in the case of my POV character, thought) about whatever important thing is missing…and especially to flag anything they see/do/say/etc. that would contradict the missing info. Sometimes, I have forty or fifty little comment notes; sometimes, only three or four.

At that point, I focus on the contradictions, because the characters are already talking about the missing issue. I’m going to have to correct them anyway, and it is usually fairly easy to change what’s happening or being talked about to provide a little more correct information or foreshadowing of the missing/revised information, rather than just delete the contradictions.

Then I go through the other flagged places, considering one at a time where a conversation or a set of actions can go slightly differently for a few lines (which, of course, will focus on the missing information). When I think I have everything the way I want it, I read over it again, in order this time.

Working backwards makes it easier for me to concentrate on the changes I want without getting wrapped around the rest of the story. This often works for other sorts of revisions, too, as long as the ones that come early in the story (which will be the last ones I get to) won’t have a significant ripple effect. Your mileage may vary.