My New Book is DONE! NOT!

This could be YOU!

This week I’m writing about revision in some more detail. I see, in Facebook writer groups especially, people who are so excited because they have “finished” their book, when what they mean is that they got to the point in the first draft where they got to type “THE END.” Did they all live happily ever after? Sure, maybe. But if you have just completed your first pass in writing a book, your work has just begun. Here are some things that have worked for me when revising my manuscript.

First, put the thing away, close the file, whatever, and do something else for at least a couple of weeks. You love those people you’ve created, they live in a marvelous world, also that you’ve created. They do all sorts of exciting and interesting stuff, that you’ve made them do of course. And, in a common phrase for writers (I don’t remember the source, but it was a famous writer,) you have Darlings in your manuscript, characters, scenes, whole segments even, chapters, subplots, etcetera, that you really love. And so do I, every time. And, you know what (here comes the quote)? You must kill your Darlings! Yep, a lot of those things you love in your manuscript just aren’t going to work, so as I go through the manuscript, I look for things that don’t contribute to the plot, don’t move the story forward, don’t fit the narrative, are out of place, or whatever might be wrong. I kill a lot of them, but, it is true, sometimes all they need is rewritten to fit better. But not often.

I find those things while being systematic. For instance, I’ll do a search for words ending in -ly. I don’t think that adverbs are necessarily (adverb) bad, but too many of them slow down a story. So I look for them, and in most cases replace them, or more likely simply remove them. I start reading my story from page one, just like a reader will someday read it. Every time I see something that seems wrong, I either fix it right away, or make a note in the margin about it so I can fix it on my next pass. Sometimes there’s no way to know for sure if something is really wrong until I read further. In my current project I have deliberately messed around with Point of View (POV) and I’ll decide while reading through the first time which way I want to go. Sometimes I think that third person limited omniscient will work best, some times I want the character to have center stage. You know my position on the rules, so you won’t be surprised to learn that I’m okay with POV changing at appropriate times during a story.

Then there is verb tense. Present tense reads as if things are more urgent (to me, you don’t have to agree.) So maybe I’ll use present tense sometimes and past tense at others. Or maybe all present tense. Or maybe all past tense. I will decide that, too, sometime in my first reading.

And spelling and grammar. Yes, those bugaboos are still with us. But, you know the rules like a professional, right, including spelling and grammar? Then you know how to break them like an artist. You do not have to take spell check or grammar checker’s word for what to use. You’re the artist, do it your way. But, only where it’s proper to do so. If you don’t know those basic language rules that well, go ahead and study them some more. (And I’d say that about any of the rules, for the record.) If I find a word spelled in a way I don’t want it to be spelled, I’ll search for the bad spelling and correct each instance.

If it looks like I’m doing these things linearly, I’m not. I do bits of each as I go along revising. There’s no hard and fast rule as to how to revise, or even what to revise. The only rule is to tell a good story, and tell it as clearly and plainly as you can, whatever that means in your case. But, I guarantee you that your first draft, even with THE END typed in, is not in shape to be published. That first draft is fun to do, but you miss a lot of things that you’ll notice as you revise.

I hope this helps. Have fun revising!