You've been digging holes for hours, days, months. You've done all of the research that you could, you've put in the time and effort. Your years of hard work have finally got you something tangible. It's your finished draft. It could be a trilobite short story. Or it could be that you've got the literary equivalent of a tyrannosaurus rex on your hands. Whatever you've written, it's like you've won the lottery it's so good.
Well, except for those two characters that you never connected to any action in the plot. Oh, yeah, and what was with the way you just stopped in chapter seven? You never resolved anything! You changed the subject and piled on chapter after chapter building on that shaky foundation. Plus, we still don't know what happened to the great uncle's yorkie. Well, now's the time for revision. Not literally now. At least finish reading this post first. Then you can get to work fixing that precious, yet disastrous, rough draft.
And I've got a revision process that will give your dead dino an extreme makeover. I'm no literary scholar, I just have a working method. No, I'm not a paleontologist, either. I got all I know about dinosaurs from Michael Crichton. My revision excavation philosophy is to work my way down through the layers from the largest chunks of text to the smallest. From the skull to the phalanges, if you will. If you'll just humor me for a few minutes, I think we could unearth something incredible together.
You know that you've got something amazing just waiting to be released. But where the heck do you start? Step one of your novel excavation includes dividing your book into manageable pieces, labeling each division, and rearranging your scenes.
It's widely suggested that you don't revise your novel immediately after drafting it. Everything's still too fresh in your mind and you're probably still too emotionally connected to the things in your story to adequately judge your own work. I like to send drafts to fellow writers for Beta reviews while I shift my focus. When I return to my novel, I'm mentally prepared to dive into the work ahead of me.
First, label each chapter and scene; describe what's happening in each scene and who the major players are. When you're done, start cutting anything that's not necessary. Filler scenes (Sheryl and Grandma's five pages of copyright-prohibited karaoke) and filler characters (that man Sheryl describes in detail and never thinks about again) have got to go. If it doesn't benefit your story, it bogs it down.
It's important to give your readers everything in the proper order. Avoid info dumps at the beginning of your novel. Spreading them out across the coming chapters is much more efficient and will make for a better read. Build up to epic battle scenes or scandalous reveals. Rather than coming to them early into the story, just hint at them and delay the payoff. The longer readers have to wait, the more suspense builds. Reorder your story to create the most entertaining and coherent pattern.
Wow, this is it. You've made it to the beautiful treasure that you've been anticipating. Wait a minute. But this is just a pile of dirty bones and rocks. Don't worry. You can fix it. Each scene needs to have its own conflict, a peak, and an opening hook. Your scene's conflict can be anything keeping a character from their goals. Everything doesn't need to be resolved by the end of each scene, of course, but each scene requires a clear beginning, middle, and end. The peak, or the scene's climax, will often come near the end. Everything else should point toward that peak.
You need to draw readers into each scene. Open with a hook, just as you would open your novel with a frantic run through the woods or the dissolve of a marriage. Your audience will only stick around if you grab their attention.
This mess is starting to look like an actual dinosaur! Now it's time to drop your shovel and get a brush so you can zero in on the details. Delete the fluff. You don't need all of those extra sentences you wrote when you were desperate to fill the page. Reorder sentences within your paragraphs, placing the most important ones at the beginnings and ends. According to the primacy/recency principle, people most remember the first and last items in a set. And you want those stellar sentences to stand out.
That was a lot of work, but you're still not done. Now you're swapping that brush for a dental pick, because you need to clean the cracks in the skull and the spaces between those foot bones. By this point you're probably exhausted, but you're hopefully really excited, too. You're so close to seeing your project complete. When you're rewording, be concise. It's better to say something in 1,000 strong words than 5,000 boring or redundant ones. Cut out excessive modifiers; make your verbs and nouns more powerful instead. Lean toward active instead of passive voice. Proofread sentences for errors and rework them for style. You want to get your message to pack a punch.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that just because your story is revised, it's complete. Read, revise, repeat.You polish those bones! It will often take quite a few drafts to get your novel ready for publication. When you think that you've refined your novel to its peak, there's likely still room for improvement. Send it off to a set of Beta readers. They can give you a perspective other than your own and they won't be as hesitant in killing your darlings. Continue this cycle until you've attained the highest point of novel perfection.
The revision process can be a lot like the excavation of a prehistoric treasure. When you put the time and effort into releasing the potential that your novel holds, it can become invaluable. It takes a lot of hard work to write and revise a book, but it's worth it when you hold the finished product in your hands and feel an overwhelming sense of accomplishment.
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