How to approach revisions

I approach revisions with a chainsaw and a lot of caffeine.

Actually, I read through for plot holes, loose ends, basic story cohesion the first time.

Then, after I've taken care of that, I go through and Strunk & White it until I'm cross-eyed, because I tend to overwrite, especially on 1st drafts. People say cutting 10% is normal. Sometimes I cut more, sometimes less, but regardless it is usually a decent chunk. Make sure words like "just" and "even" are cut to a minimum. Watch for repetition, and even the random chapter that chances are the story would do fine without. That's my usual process. Hope it helps some.

-Oh yeah, and I totally missed the PC or hard copy thing. Don't mind me, I'm half asleep. I give my beta readers hard copies to write ideas/comments on, but when I do my revisions they are 75% on the comp. Sometimes if I'm feeling lazy I print a chapter out and purple pen it to death. If you feel like you need to have something tangible to show how productive you've been, printing it out is the way to go. Sometimes I have more purple on the page than black, and when I look at the chapter I feel like I've made a lot of progress. On the computer, it's backspace- edit

You have to struggle and find the way that works best for you--I work from the beginning all the way to the end on my mac.
-- I know it isn't easy for anyone. Anybody who says different is a big fibber.

Read dialog out loud.

Others have said to read the entire MS out loud. I agree with this also, but I hate the sound of my own voice. Reading dialog out loud is a good start and will help you with flow and just plain weird sounding speech. When your comfortable with that, read the entire thing out loud.

I have been asking myself a lot of questions (thanks to AW).
Is this an information dump?
Is there enough description here?
Are there too many "thats"?

I guess you have to take a step back and look at your work objectively.

I use way too many 'that's the more i read my writing the more i notice them. But i guess 'thats' what revisions are for.

I generally approach revisions from the left and with caution. I like to print it out and read it from beginning to end as if I were a reader and this were a published book. I keep a pad of paper beside me and make notes, or write/rewrite scenes, while I go along. Of course, I also do a line edit. It's easier to find errors that I missed when I edit on paper, than it is to see them on the screen.

Best of luck Raphee!!

CaroGirl said:

I generally approach revisions from the left and with caution. I like to print it out and read it from beginning to end as if I were a reader and this were a published book. I keep a pad of paper beside me and make notes, or write/rewrite scenes, while I go along. Of course, I also do a line edit. It's easier to find errors that I missed when I edit on paper, than it is to see them on the screen.

Best of luck Raphee!!

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I couldn't have said it better. I printed out my entire MS and took it out of town, far from my computer. There, the mischaracterizations, the weak dialog, the rambling scenes and the unexpected repetition of words like "stomach" and "dread" and "unsure" became glaringly obvious. I discovered that entire chapters deserved to be trashed and replaced.

Much of my "editing" is rewriting. But the MS keeps getting stronger.

I usually do a printout, and before doing the printout I change the font of the whole document so it looks totally different from how it did on screen.

I read the whole thing out loud, either to my husband or just to myself. Sometimes I get someone else to read parts out loud to me. That's always very illuminating... and a little scary. But it works. I have my laptop open as the read-through progresses and I type my thoughts into a "notes" file -- what works, what doesn't, what needs to be added, what I still need to research, etc. On paper I'll map out the plot I have vs. the plot I want. I'll also write out character sheets for the main figures in my novel -- what they do in each chapter, how they act from scene to scene. This is a good way to figure out if your characters' motivations are clear and make sense.

Like others have said, most of my editing takes the form of totally rewriting whole scenes, chapters, or, well, novels (as I'm doing right now). When I get down to the nitty-gritty of taking out superfluous "that"s
and rewording sentences to get rid of passive voice, I file those changes under "tweaking."

All great advice. I write it, put it away until I can look at it with fresh eyes, and then edit it from a printout.

Now if I didn't write it, I might look at it on the computer at least once, depending on how big the mess is, but eventually I'm going to a printout or else I'll miss things.

Also, I suppose we should specify what kind of "revision" it is. Story level editing can be done any old way, I think, as long as it's done well and you're comfortable doing it that way. But down on the grammar/spelling/typo level, I've gotta have paper. And dialogue editing, which someone mentioned above, is its own special kind of fun. (I'm not being facetious.) Read it out loud and make the neighbors think you're crazy. It's a hoot.

Hey, you wrote a book! Most people never do.

Oh, and when you do read dialogue aloud, I think your dogs and cats will love it. Who cares what the people say?

larocca said:

Oh, and when you do read dialogue aloud, I think your dogs and cats will love it. Who cares what the people say?

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This is very true. My dogs sit on my lap and go all snuggly when I read my dialogue aloud. Of course, I've become quite skilled at holding the papers in one hand and scratching ears with the other.

I do a couple of rewrites, with different goals. First rewrite is the "hunter-killer" RW, in which I just hunt for excess verbiage to cut, and break long sentences up into smaller ones. While doing this, I often find questionable passages (didn't I make this point earlier/later? Did I include the necessary background for this to make sense? etc.). I put a comment in to be read on a later rewrite.

I do all but my last RW on the computer, but I find that for some reason, ink on paper reads slightly differently than electrons on a screen, so I always do one last read-through on paper, and invariably, something that looked fine up till then needs rewording.

I compartmentalize my rewrites because, if I were doing a cutting rewrite and stopped to check whether a passage was already covered elsewhere, the lack of focus would make the job seem unbearably huge, and I'd be tempted to give up. Compartmentalizing breaks the job up into smaller, manageable jobs.

Hi Raphee,
I do all of my WIPs on my PC. I have finished a novel and have had around 15 beta-readers go through it for me, they spotted the things I didn't. I took along a couple of comments and corrected things to make them . After that, I found a brilliant way to edit myself... I suspect others do this too.
I send my own work to my googlemail account each time I've been working on it. When I was sure it was totally finished, I downloaded it to my PC via an html page format from google. This is excellent if you're working via your PC on MS Word etc. You cannot edit the html page. So you have your WIP in front of you and the html page, then you use it to do a line by line edit of your own work. It's surprising what you catch doing it this way.



Elodie

All the good one-liners have been taken.

I was going to say, I approach revisions on tippy-toes with a bat behind my back. Then I beat it senseless. After that, its putty in my hands.

My little nugget of advice it to save many different forms of your WIP. Save your first draft as a seperate document, then go back and be merciless with the delete key. It's very liberating to think, "Well, if this is awful as I re-write it I can go back to the way it was, which was OK." I almost always end up with something better, but it's easier for me to have that safety net.

The biggest thing I've learned in my process is don't be afraid to toss something! If it sucks, it sucks, and no amount of editing will make it as good as I want.