How to Revise a Novel

First things first: congratulations on finishing your draft! I hope you’re taking the time to celebrate such a monumental achievement. Go get or make yourself something nice!

If you struggle with celebrating yourself and your accomplishments, you can also think of it as a little treat to help you come to terms with the fact that you have a ways left to go on your journey to getting your book published regardless of whether you’re going the indie or traditional publishing route.

In this blog post, I’m talking specifically about the revising ahead of you—that is, the changes that need to happen for your story to become not just cohesive, but compulsively readable.

I’ve touched before on how I view the writing process. If you’re a fan of that blog post, note that this is part of the medium grind, and can sometimes involve taking a step back to the coarse grind to co(a/u)rse correct (pun intended!). That means we’re not focused on the prose or the polishing right now, but the structural integrity of the story.

Step One: Hit save and take a break.

Don’t just save your draft, either. You’re going to want to export it and back it up in at least two places. If you’re not the type to do this of your own accord—or if you’ve never lost weeks’ worth of work in one fell swoop—you might think this is overkill. I can assure you it is not. The future is unknowable, and there is no reason to believe such a tragic loss could never happen to you (though I sincerely hope it never does!).

This doesn’t have to be complicated. Here are a few relatively painless ways you can backup your draft:

• Email a copy to yourself (CC any backup emails you may have)
• Copy it to a USB drive or external hard drive
• Download it to your desktop and your tablet or phone’s storage (and if you have older devices in your home, it wouldn’t hurt to add it there, too!)
• Upload the doc to a cloud storage service
• Print out a copy and keep it in a binder somewhere safe (bonus points if you have a second copy stored in another physical location)

Then, I want you to take a guilt-free break from this particular project. A week, let’s say. Writing a novel draft is a marathon; no one would expect a marathon runner not to take some time for recovery after crossing the finish line. If you’re worried about losing momentum, there are plenty of other ways to stay creative even when you’re not writing. (If you’re interested in a blog post about that, let me know in the comments!)

Step Two: Read it and take notes.

Read it, but don’t touch it. Don’t even touch the typos. Fixing typos in a sentence you may delete later is a waste of your time.

Instead, I want you to leave comments in the doc. Lots of comments. More than you think you need. I promise that you will have more than one brilliant thought while reading through the draft, and it will be lost forever if you don’t capture it. Jot down:

• Sweeping changes that need to happen to the plot
• Problems with your character arc execution (I can help with those!)
• Details that don’t line up with previous descriptions or orders of events
• Ideas for additional or alternative scenes
• Anything you think should be added to, subtracted from, or moved to a(nother) chapter
• Lines of prose you like (if they survive into the final draft, this will save you while pulling quotes for social posts)
• Your emotional journey as you read
• Any part that feels “off,” even if you can’t put your finger on why you feel that way yet
• Anything else that pops into your head while reading, like what tropes are being hit or what scenes remind you of a potential comp title

I especially want you to make note of anything positive. It’s so easy to point out what needs to change and what falls short of your own expectations, but it’s hard to remember the good parts of your book when you’re deep into the break-it-to-fix-it phase. (Also, it’s always so nice to stumble on a compliment from your past self!)

For more tips on commenting during the writing process, check out this post I wrote for Writer’s Atelier’s blog.

Step Three: Reverse outline the story as it is now.

Yes, even if you know you’re going to delete Chapter 4 and Chapter 17 later.

Do this by summarizing the events of a chapter after you’ve read it. If you can distill what’s happening in the chapter down to a single sentence or two, even better. You want this bird’s eye view when, say, you realize you need to drop in some foreshadowing in one very specific scene, but can’t for the life of you remember which chapter it’s in. Ask me how I know!

If you tend to have pacing issues with your story, then this becomes even more critical as a diagnostic tool. Being able to zoom out gives you the ability to compare your narrative with readers’ expectations of when certain beats are supposed to happen. For example, if you discover the midpoint of your character’s arc is happening 70% of the way through the story, you’ll know you’ve got some rewriting or rearranging to do.

(Oh, and if you later write totally new versions of Chapter 4 and Chapter 17? Write down summaries for those chapters, too.)

Step Four: Document the details you want to keep and the changes you’re planning to make in a big list.

This is redundant because those changes are already noted in the comments you made earlier, right? Wrong! This is not merely a list for keeping track of what to do. It’s going to be what you return to when you’re discouraged and feeling like you haven’t made a dent. It is documentation of all changes, and that visual will be critically important for morale if you’ve got a lot of revising ahead of you. Plus, if you need to walk away from revisions for any reason, you’ll have the list to help you jump back in.

Ordering and organizing this list will be a challenging exercise in prioritizing. Read through your comments and add anything tackling plot-shifting and character-changing problems to the top of your list. The smaller the scale of the problem, the lower it should be on your list.

Remember that, since this is part of the medium grind, we’re focusing mostly on structural and scene-level changes. If you want to mess with the prose, resist, and consider making another list of line-level changes. But I bet a good chunk of them will resolve themselves over the course of your revising!

Make it a color-coded spreadsheet, handwritten checkboxes in a notebook, a new page in your doc—whatever, but do not skip making the list, I beg of you!

Step Five: Get granular and get going.

You have your to do list all nice and orderly now. All you need to do is take it one task at a time starting from the top. This probably means that you’re starting with something monumental, like overhauling your magic system or merging two characters together—something that will have ripple effects across chapters, if not the entirety of the novel.

My best advice without knowing your specific situation is to take a breath and break down your big problem. Get to the core of the issue, solve it (maybe the magic system is missing a price to pay for power, or maybe Character A+B will be in Location X instead of having the protagonist meet Character A in Location Y and Character B in Location Z), then use your chapter summaries to remind yourself where in the book you need to make changes. Make those changes safe in the knowledge that you’ve already backed up your original draft, so nothing is irreversible if you decide you liked things better the way they were.

Remember this as you revise your novel: no matter how big the problem is, it can be solved with a little brainstorming and creativity.

Lucky for you, that’s my thing!

Does your story need a rethink? Hire me as your story coach!

After spending eighteen months working on my story in my own little bubble, I decided to invest in myself and use Megan’s story coaching services, and I am so glad I did! … She met me where I was with my story, and gave me the clarity I needed to move forward. I left the session invigorated and excited to get to work.

Allyssa