How to Revise
when you're stuck and uncertain
Hi, I’m Kate. Ask an Author is an advice column for authors at all stages of writing, publishing, and hand-wringing. Have a question? Fill out this form and I’ll answer it in a future response!
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Dear Kate,
How do you approach revisions when you’ve gotten a lot of feedback from multiple sources? I finished a draft of my novel (fantasy) and sent it to readers. I got feedback from each of them, but now every time I sit down to try to incorporate it I get stuck. Do I go through the book chronologically? That doesn’t work with my neurodivergent brain and isn’t how I wrote the draft, but is that the best way to do it now? I’ve written other books before but none that I finished all the way so this is new.
- Stuck
Dear Stuck,
First: Congratulations on finishing your first draft! And sending it out for feedback! And persisting through this “What do I do now???” moment! (Which is just a moment and which I promise you will get through.)
I want you to know that EVERYONE is overwhelmed by feedback. (If you’re reading this and saying “Not me! I never feel that way!” congratulations on being perfect and please keep your thoughts to yourself.) Tackling revisions is just another one of those things about writing that’s hard (add it to the list!) but the fact that it’s hard doesn’t mean that you’re doing it wrong or have made a mistake or shouldn’t be writing or aren’t going to be able to get through these revisions. Writing is hard! Revising is hard! Thinking is hard! Feeling challenged is a sign that you’re learning and improving and getting that much closer to a stronger book in the end.
Here are some things I do when I get revision notes and am figuring out what to do:
1. I read what my agent/editor/friend/reader has sent me. I say thank you. (Whether you agree or disagree or think they’ve gotten it totally wrong and want to defend yourself — ALWAYS SAY THANK YOU.) And then I close the email/word doc/whatever and tuck it in the back of my brain for 2-3 days and don’t think about it. I don’t reread it, don’t contact the person again, and don’t look at my manuscript. I let it sit.
So often, my first reaction is some big knee-jerk response, regardless of whether I think they’re 100% right or 100% wrong. It’s too extreme—I’m too close to the notes I’ve just read. I need time to digest them and think it through, and inevitably I find that when I come back after 2-3 days and reread the feedback, I have a different perspective. I see nuances I hadn’t noticed before and have ideas I hadn’t considered in that first read. I feel more confident that when I think of the changes I want to make, and the suggestions I want to ignore, I’m making those decisions from a thoughtful place, with an eye toward what’s best for my manuscript, and not out of a sense that my book is crap and I need to change everything, or my book is amazing and how dare they not get it. Even when I’m really excited about the possible changes! Sometimes I get pumped up about a new idea—and only after the dust settles do I realize that it might not be the best move.
The 2-3 day time frame is, for me, enough time to feel like I’m able to SEE the feedback more clearly, but not so much time that I’m avoiding confronting the difficult next step, or getting too far away from my manuscript that I lose the connection I need to be able to keep going. The time frame may be wildly different for you, but the point is: consider giving yourself some distance to change your perspective, but not so much distance that you lose your nerve.
(There are only a few people that I like to get verbal feedback from instead of written, because we’ve worked together closely for so many years that we can brainstorm and spitball together in a way that feels meaningful and productive to me. For the most part, though, I personally prefer written feedback because I can think it through and come back to it, and I don’t feel put on the spot to respond in the moment. Receiving feedback isn’t a dialogue wherein someone tells me what they didn’t get from the manuscript and I tell them all the ways I did XYZ and they didn’t see it. So I try to avoid anything that can tempt that dynamic. However! You may love talking it out with people in the moment, in which case—go for it! This is a list of what I do, not a doctrine on How To Revise.)
2. By the time I’ve gotten feedback from a few sources and given myself time to sit with it, my brain is usually buzzing. The next thing I do is start writing out everything I’m thinking of. It doesn’t have to be coherent. Or logical. Or in any kind of order. It’s a brain-dump of thoughts and it’s only for me. I do this in a notebook, by hand, because I feel more creative when I’m not at the computer—like there’s less pressure for me to Make It Good. But that’s just me! Your literal only job here is to find what works for you.
3. I write out all the aspects of the manuscript I’ve been thinking of, and then I go back through what I’ve written and see what’s emerged in that muck. Common threads? Specific issues? I start clumping my ideas together: scenes, characters, plot points, specific writing problems, etc. Now I’m starting to take that chaos of the brain-dump and shaping it into something more usable. I’m still overwhelmed, but I’m starting to have some direction!
4. Next, I take those clumps and start narrowing them down even further. My goal is to wind up with a checklist. The checklist is a list of whatever things I need to work on in the manuscript, distilled into short enough phrases/sentences that I feel like when I reread them, I know what I need to do. Stuff like: “Cut _____ and thread relevant info in other places.” “More motivation for _____ in _____ scene.” “Tighten ______.” “Add _____ to show _____.” I’m not saying any of this is EASY to do it. But I can’t revise what I haven’t thought of or don’t understand. This process of organizing my thoughts is about identifying and articulating to myself what I want to do with my revision. I’m creating ACTIONABLE items—things I can do. There’s no judgment in these notes. I’m not saying “____ sucks” or “Make _____ suck less.” I’ve done all my whining in my free writing to myself. The list is about taking the problems I’ve identified and distilling how I want to solve them.
Once I have this more focused list, I’m in a stronger place to start the actual revising. I can go through the list and tackle each item, in whatever order I want.
There are of course LOTS of other ways to do this! My friend Lyz writes herself an edit letter, including telling herself what’s successful in her manuscript—in addition to what needs work. I love this idea, and not just for the ego boost. Keeping an eye on what’s working in my manuscript also gives me a sense of what to amplify and make sure I keep and draw out, which is just as important as knowing what to cut or change.
I also sometimes take different approaches than the checklist, especially if I need to make sure I’m hitting specific feedback notes and not missing the mark. When I got back my first edit letter from my agent, I made a spreadsheet that had each scene in question, her comment, and then how I planned to address it. This helped me organize her comments along with my thoughts and gave me that roadmap I needed to get started when I was feeling overwhelmed. (And, like the checklist, the satisfaction of crossing out each row on the spreadsheet once I’d finished!)
When I really, really don’t know where to start, my next go-to method is to make a reverse outline of the manuscript and identify what I’ve already written. If I know something isn’t working but I can’t figure out what or how to fix it, spending more time digging into the overall structure of the narrative often helps me see something I might have missed before, or knocks something loose in my mind that can get me started again.
And honestly, if you really, really don’t know where to begin, and/or if every time you sit down to try to start any of this you start to freeze up, it’s okay to take a break. Give yourself time. Writing takes a lot of not writing! Time to go for walks and be with friends and think and read and write other things, and the manuscript will still be there when you’re ready for it. So often I’ve been completely stuck, and then months go by and I suddenly have an idea and am ready to get back into the manuscript and keep working through it. I needed those months before I could have the breakthrough, and while I wish all the ideas could come to me instantly and perfectly formed, that’s not how it works, and there’s no advantage to rushing. You’ll go through many revisions, not just this first round. Give yourself the grace and patience to let the process unfold.
Note that nowhere in here have I said that you need to start at the beginning and go chronologically through your revisions. Maybe some people do that. Good for them! But you don’t need to. Your first task here is to identify what revisions you want to make. Then you can start doing them in whatever way feels supportive and sustainable to you. Sometimes I start with the smallest revisions first—the things I feel more confident I can accomplish—because I’m going for the snowball effect, where I get that dopamine hit and sense of satisfaction from one manageable thing and then gain momentum as I start to do more. Sometimes I’ll revise one scene and then only later do I realize that another scene now needs more attention, and so I wind up going out of order because that’s the order in which the ideas came to me, which has nothing to do with the chronology of the manuscript or the order in which the scenes were written.
At the end of the day, the reader is going to have no idea how you wrote manuscript or how you revised it—whether you outlined or pantsed it or wrote in order or wrote your first chapter last or had no idea what the ending was until you were six drafts in. In the end, after all your many, many drafts, your manuscript will read seamlessly and a reader won’t be able to see all that stitching, which I hope is freeing because it means you have the freedom to work out what feels best for you, and not what you think you should do. There are some general guidelines that can be helpful—I do think that if you aren’t sure where to begin, it’s a good idea to do some writing and thinking to help give you a sense of direction. But the BEST WAY to revise is the one that has you feeling engaged with your manuscript. You don’t have to take ALL the suggestions you were given by your readers (and I have a post about how to sort through reader feedback, especially if you’ve been given contradictory advice). I think your first move here is to spend more time with the feedback you’ve been given and think through what you want this next draft to accomplish. The way you go about doing that is completely up to you.
Good luck!
Kate
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