Choose your revision tool
You’ve finished your first draft of your novel! After you celebrate that accomplishment, it’s time to go to the next step: revision. How do you go about this step? What tools can help you step back and see what you’ve got and understand what needs work? I’m going to discuss a few different options, but the important point is that you should choose the tool that fits best with the way your mind works.
Before I get into the specific approaches, let’s talk about what we are trying to solve for. I wrote in one of last year’s newsletters about writers’ word problem: in short, there are so very many of them. Trying to tackle the revision process by scrolling and searching through a 400-page, 100,000-word document is both ineffective and painful.
The goal for this first stage of revision is to get a clear picture of what you currently have in the draft, and to do that you need some kind of summary, a big-picture view that will allow you to see the whole shape of your manuscript at once. Here are the elements such a summary should include for every scene:
Story event: What happens in the scene?
POV: Whose point of view are we in? (You can eliminate this category if your novel uses only one point of view.)
Time: When does the scene take place? Noting this will help you identify and untangle chronology problems.
Location: Where does the scene take place?
Here are some approaches to consider:
Spreadsheet: This is the method I use myself when working with clients on developmental edits. I like spreadsheets because they are easy to customize and manipulate. I can add columns if, for example, I’m working on a novel with complex backstory or mystery elements that need to be tracked across scenes. I can hide columns that aren’t relevant to whatever problem I’m currently thinking through. I can color-code different plot strands or POV characters and easily experiment with different chapter orders. Here’s a link to the template spreadsheet I use.
Sticky notes or notecards: If you are a very visual or tactile person, you might prefer to create a sticky note or notecard for each scene. These might be physical notes or cards that you can put up on a wall or spread out on a table, or you could use a digital equivalent. Scrivener’s corkboard feature would work just as well for revision as it does for storyboarding; just make a new revision file so you feel free to play around without losing work from your main manuscript. If you’re one of my clients, you already know how much I love Trello for managing big projects. I think it can be a good tool for revision as well. Check out this novel revision board I put together.
Good old-fashioned paper: I love my digital tools, but paper is still one of the best technologies ever invented. Sometimes switching from screen to paper can uncap a fresh reservoir of creativity. The trick is to put your manuscript into a format that allows you to focus on the big picture. Try formatting your book in a tiny but just barely legible typeface to reduce the page count and prevent you from getting distracted by sentence-level edits. Leave some white space at the top of each page to write your summary and other information. Hang your pages up on a wall, spread them out on the floor, or put them in a binder you can quickly leaf through.
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