E. Beck asked about tips on revising a manuscript with multiple problems
Revising a manuscript is one of those things that most writers find either relatively easy, or almost impossible. It really depends on the writer…and on when and why the writer wants to fix the manuscript.
Let’s deal with the “when” first. “Rolling revisions” happen during the course of drafting. Some writers start a new day’s work by revising the previous day’s work as a sort of warm-up. Other times, you get to a point where you suddenly realize that you need to make changes in a scene three chapters ago in order for what’s currently going on to work properly.
Next, there’s the major mid-story redo, where you’re halfway (or more) through the novel and you suddenly realize that chapters have to be rearranged, subplots combined or significantly altered, structure reworked, characters dropped or added, or other major alterations made that mean the whole manuscript has to be restarted from the beginning.
Finally, there are problems that you can only see (or only realize how to fix) when the whole first draft is sitting in front of you. These can range from small tweaks and consistency fixes to major additions, deletions, and rearrangements. Some writers prefer to save everything until the manuscript is finished.
I personally started off as a rolling reviser. After about 5 books, I started running into major mid-story redos. Now, I do all three from time to time, depending on the needs of the story. I know some writers who hit a mid-story redo point and can deliberately ignore it until they get to the end of the draft and can tackle all the revisions at once. You’re not required to work one way or another.
Why the writer wants to revise can range from “my mother/teacher/best friend told me I should” through “This bit is just wrong/isn’t working” to “I just had a much better idea for how this should go.” All of these can be valid, though “somebody told me to” only works well if it means that you saw and understood and agreed that they were right.
Finally we come to ways of tackling revisions. I generally make a list of what I think the story needs, grouped in some way that seems logical to me at the moment. Some books, it’s by the type of problem—these are character problems, these are the plot holes/thin places, these are the background bits, these are the inconsistencies, etc. Other books, it’s mostly chronological—problems in the first clump of chapters, the second clump, the third clump, etc. Other books, it’s by difficulty—these are the things I know I’m going to have the hardest time doing (or that will take the most words to do); these are things that are tricky but I only have to fix in one place; these are things that are pretty straightforward but will need a new scene or a couple of paragraphs added to several different scenes; these are tweaks that will need a bunch of sentences fixed all through the ms., etc.
Regardless of how I choose to group the revisions, I almost always proceed to do the easiest, most obvious, most straightforward ones first, unless they overlap a scene that needs a really major rewrite. (Fixing the grammar or consistency in a sentence that has a good chance of being cut seems like a waste of time.) While I’m fixing the stuff that I know exactly how and where to fix, I continue adding to my list if I spot anything else, and (since I’m working on a computer) I use the highlighter function to mark anything that still needs fixing but that I’m not going to tackle right now.
I skip around the book in a fairly hit-and-miss manner, gradually whittling down my problem list. This leaves the most difficult issues for the end, but they usually seem a lot more manageable when the other stuff is already done. Also, once in a great while, fixing the easier things changes the flow of the story just enough that I don’t actually need to alter a particularly tricky scene I was avoiding tackling.
For instance, my editor sent me three pages (or thereabouts) of requested revisions on the manuscript for Mairelon the Magician. One request was to add more tension to the final chapter of the book, which I had no idea how to do. Another was to punch up the misery of the street life my heroine was trying to escape, which I did know how to do (tweaking multiple conversations and some internal dialog)—fairly straightforward, but fiddly and time-consuming.
I went ahead and punched up the misery as requested, and made most of the other changes before I came back to what I thought of as The Big One (adding tension to the last chapter). And when I looked at it, I realized that I didn’t have to change a word—the other revisions (especially punching up the horror of the street life) had already raised the tension level of that last scene.
An alternative is to work your way methodically through changes in some kind of order—start with Chapter One and proceed in order through the story, or make multiple passes doing one kind of fix at a time (e.g., first all the characterization fixes, then all the plot points or dialog, then all the background…whatever order feels right to you). Or alternate focusing on a tough problem with focusing on an easy one.
The main thing is to find a method that will not get you bogged down and resistant. I find that starting with the easy ones builds momentum, and by the time I get to the tough stuff, it feels like “Yes, this one is bad, but then there’s only one more and I’ll be done!” (Barn door syndrome for the win.) Other writers prefer to knock off the toughest problems first and then coast through the others as things get easier and easier. Or they work on the hard problems until they find themselves avoiding doing anything, and then spend some time knocking off a few easy ones to get their oomph back before they tackle the next tough one.
What works for you, works for you. There Is No One True Way. Try stuff until you find the thing that works. (Note that “works for you” unfortunately does not mean “makes it all easy to do.” “Works” only means that you can get it done, not that it’s easy.)
I’m finding myself confuzled about what you mean by “rolling revision.” Are you using it as a general term for most any sort of revision of an incomplete first draft – anything short of tossing the manuscript and starting over? (Or at least major surgery involving the removal of limbs and the transplant of organs?) Or do you mean something more specific?
My normal process involves getting part way through the first draft, going back to the beginning and doing a revision pass of what I’ve written so far, and then continuing. I’ve thought of this as “rolling revision” but it doesn’t seem to fit what you mean, unless you’re using a very broad meaning of the term.
I’ve also done “go back and fix that one thing two chapters back” and “revise yesterday’s work as a warm up,” but not on any regular or frequent basis. More frequent has been “on finishing the first draft of Chapter (N), do a quick revision pass before starting Chapter (N+1)”
This post might help clarify a few things.
https://pcwrede.com/pcw-wp/rolling-revisions/
Oooh, a new form of rolling revision!
I’m definitely of the “revising is impossible” school. I feel that in order to do a proper edit, I must hold all the fiddly bits of the story in the forefront of my consciousness, suspending every scene, phrase, and word in the air in a juggling act of epic complexity.
That said, for market considerations, I did attempt to cut a few thousand words from a WIP, only to find that after the edit, I had four thousand more words than I started with.
I just finished (ha!) revising a novel.
I am a pantzer. I rolling-revise by looking back a couple of pages each time I sit down to write, and by revising as I copy material from notebook or flat file to Word document. But this misses a lot of stuff, especially macro issues.
For the big revision at the end I did a couple things:
(1) On recommendation from the Web, I made a one-line-per-scene list of the whole novel. This is supposed to find excess scenes; in my case it found things like “Chapter 6 is all one scene, is that correct?” and some missing or misplaced ones.
(2) I did multiple wordsmithing passes on each of the three parts separately, and took notes on any issues bigger than wordsmithing. I ended up with a file of plot holes, missing elements (poor Priya, can’t she get some dialog?), and global improvements (use more senses).
(3) I cultivated a sense of “I wince every time I read that paragraph, it needs fixing.” If the fix is not obvious I tend to glide right by these…had to work hard not to do that.
(4) The two big fight scenes had to be COMPLETELY revised; one of them, nearly from scratch. For that I worked out where every critter was and who was controlling it, and then traced out where they went during the fight. I drew a map, too. This was a ton of work but the improvements were HUGE. Kalyani didn’t just go after her sisters out of power-lust; she needed subcontrollers to manage her growing forces. That illuminated the whole fight.
So, short form: Take notes, and be prepared to make multiple passes (I think it took me six). You do not have to fix everything all at once. Also, newly added text won’t be as polished as the rest, but if you got that polish by revision, you’ll have to revise the new text too. Don’t get hung up on making newly added text perfect the first time.
Mid-story and rolling revisions can be ways to vacuum the cat, so it’s wise to be wary if you find they are keeping you from moving forward. Though they can buy you time to work through knots, so this is definitely a “Know thyself” thing. (That is why some writers never revise without a first draft.)
I note that on “someone told you to” there are two additional considerations: they may have diagnosed the problem correctly, but their fix is all wrong, and they may have diagnosed the problem incorrectly, but they are entirely right about their being a problem.
And you want to fix everything you can before you get a second opinion because then you’ve burned that reader. OTOH, you don’t want to get so burned out on the story that you can’t bring yourself to revise it when the reader has found a problem.
The one I found the hardest to fix:
Both of my first-readers noted that Kay’s nightmare (which is really a symptom of mind manipulation, and significant as such) went by too fast and they didn’t recall it when the big reveal arrived, making the reveal puzzling rather than dramatic.
One of them suggested just making it longer, more intense, more obtrusively abnormal: I did that, but I have no real way to tell what a first-time reader will think. Enough? Too much? Dunno. And neither reader, of course, will know either.
Thanks for the suggestions, everybody! I’ll have to experiment and see what works.
I think at least half of my struggle is a motivation issue; I’ve already fixed everything I can on previous passes, and now am stuck revising the scenes that made me want to quit the story the first time ’round (AKA, Lyn is traveling into the forest, but traveling scenes are boring, but this particular traveling section is plot-important–or at least, thematically important, because I’ve already shown that this forest is Big, Bad, and Scary, and if I just skip it that reduces the readers’ expectations of it, but if I reduce its reputation so I can skip it, then why is Lyn the only one to travel into it in 3 or 4 centuries?). It’s not the biggest problem I’ve faced with this WIP, but it is the toughest one, because I just Don’t Feel Like sitting down to try and figure it out, and besides, isn’t my homework more important anyway?
But the other half is a sense of Not Knowing How to Proceed, so having some new things to try might help. 🙂
If you don’t mind a suggestion for your forest scene –
Start with some internal monologue from your viewpoint character as she enters the forest. Worried about its reputation, the fact no one’s been here in hundreds of years, etc. That should establish the big & bad part.
Then you should be able to do one single incident to show her fears are accurate.
Then some more interior monologue about how “something like that happened every few days, but none quite as bad as that first one.”
You don’t have to spend a lot of time on it, but by showing the character’s emotional investment, it gets readers to invest as well.
Or, hey, cross everybody up, and have her find out that sometime in the last 3-4 centuries, an ecological disaster or something left the forest all but uninhabited! 🙂
Some other forest ideas:
If it’s narrative summary, can you make an arc through that with something like “at first, Lyn thought her biggest problem would be X, but after 5 days it was clear that Y”?
If there are dramatized bits, can you pull in more senses? The too-thick layer of needles on the ground that muffles her footsteps. The heavy smell of leaf-mould and decay. The birds that cry late at night, and what it reminds her of. The temperature under the heavy canopy. The sickly taste of the berries she tries picking.
One telling incident could flavor the narrative summary of the rest. A long-dead traveler, a strange beast, the sound of something following her. In Bellairs’ _The Face in the Frost_ the protag sees animal eyes peering from a hollow trunk, but when he looks closer, the animal is dead, mummified in place. (That scene in general has the best telling details I have ever seen.)
@Kevin Wade Johnson and @Mary Kuhner — Thanks for the suggestions! I’ll have to try those out!
I learned an unpleasant lesson today:
The first page tends to be rough, because as a pantser I have NO idea where I’m going at that point, and also tend to be in a hurry.
But I don’t naturally revise it, because my revision mindset involves reading *toward* the problem bit, and there’s no way to do that with the first page!
There were issues. I fixed them, alas too late for my first two queries. Really surprised by this blind spot.
A great rule to steal from musicals: you write the opening number last, because then you know what you want to set up.
I made myself plot out my second novel and follow the outline/plot, just to prove I could do it. (That was silly.) Anyway, one thing that has helped me with sailing into a novel and not having to go back and rewrite the start is to know the ending. Not exactly, necessarily, but where it’s going – how it’s going to come out.
With practice I got to where I could toss in set-ups as I went, knowing I’d pay them off later. I’d rather remove any unused ones in revisions, rather than go back and add them in.
Unfortunately my process, for everything I have ever written, involves multiple bouts of “OMG *this* happens here, I would never have guessed.”
In a fantasy novel I established that 1 in 3 of people who attempt a certain thing go mad, turn into a monster, and/or die. The Emperor’s 4 children tried it…clearly I needed to sacrifice one. I picked the least characterized one.
When I wrote the scene, the Emperor raised her from the dead, leaving her mad and a monster, and told the protagonist to deal with it. Oops! But having written it…that was what happened. No doubt about it. Patricia talks about things setting up like concrete–this one wouldn’t budge to high explosives.
Most of the story doesn’t set up like this. I can put things in; with a bit more difficulty I can often take them out. But major turning points, no. It feels more like discovery than invention, and I can’t un-discover something. (Next to last chapter in the WIR is one of those. I moped over it for a week, but that’s what happened and there’s not much to be done for it. Character will turn to cardboard if I try.)
Some of us are lucky and can wrest out those sorts of surprises in a really, really, really rough first draft. So rough that we call them outlines.
Fleshing it out into a proper first draft often has surprises, up to major subplots, but I can generally force it to tell me the major twists. (Because when I don’t, it may turn out that it doesn’t have them, and the plot collapses.)