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Dear Kate,
Do you have any general tips or a checklist for what to look for when sitting down to revise? I know to get feedback from other people, but even before I send it out, I’d like to be able to get better at looking at my own work. I’m sure I’m missing things, though! Any help for covering my bases?
— K.M.
Dear K.M.,
I think you’re asking the right question by recognizing that you, the author, can work on and develop your revising muscle, which is somewhat different from your drafting muscle, and that this work happens in tandem with feedback from outside readers because one is not a replacement for the other. There are certainly things you can look for and pay attention to as you go back through your manuscript with the eye of an editor and a reader rather than the initial storyteller, and ways you can adjust your mindset to see your work with fresh eyes and an open mind.
At the same time, though, I want to gently complicate this idea of a checklist. There’s no set list of Things You Must Cover that will *definitely* apply to your piece, or that Every Author Must Address or else you’ll, I dunno, fail at noveling. Even if there were a list and you went through it with a fine-tooth comb, you still won’t be able to say boom, I did each of those things, now I’m done and my book is all set and ready to go off into the world!!!
Writing is one of those things where you get better at it by doing more of it, and there’s stuff you can learn to pay attention to in that doing, but also some of it just sort of happens by building all this up over time, and it feels like magic because you can’t pinpoint most of it happening in the moment(s) it’s happening, but of course it isn’t magic — it’s a lot of hard work. And yet even in that work there’s no formula to memorize or clear connection between input and output, such that if you do X thing you will definitely be guaranteed Y outcome, where Y is “success” in whatever form that looks like to you.
With all those caveats that this isn’t so much “covering your bases” as “expanding ideas about how to consider the process of writing,” here’s my own brainstorming about what I look for and think about when going from first draft to subsequent drafts — emphasis on the plural!!! This is not a one-time thing, but a process you’ll come back to over and over again. You’ll revise, then see how those revisions have changed things, then revise again based on those changes, until you slowly move toward a thing that feels complete in ways you never would have imagined when you set down your very first sentences.
An Incomplete, Non-Exhaustive Revision Checklist
Big Picture
Start with the biggest, foundational stuff:
Structure
This is the way the story is organized or put together, and how each part or component connects to build the larger story and ultimately resolves by the end. Are your events unfolding in the right order? What’s missing? What do you have too much of? What else do you need to add?
Where are the beats or turning points in your story? What are the pivotal moments of change?
Pacing
This is the rate at which the events are unfolding, in terms of how it feels to the reader. What’s too fast and needs more breathing room or development? What’s too slow and can be tightened or amped up? What’s the rhythm of the story overall, and how does each component contribute or fit in? You can’t guess how every reader will feel, but you can read with an eye toward your ideal reader will experience the story.
What matters in your book? Why does it matter to your characters? Why does it matter to your readers? My last three rounds of revisions with my agent on a new manuscipt have all been about stakes! Changing what my main character discovers (aka amplifying the stakes for her) has meant changing all sorts of other scenes and moments in the book. Even if I liked those moments on their own, if they don’t serve the story I’m telling, they have to be changed. I have a whole separate post about stakes. They’re so important and so often they’re left out or left behind or not nearly enough!
Goal/Motivation/Conflict
I learned from an editor years ago to call this the GMC (thanks, Alycia!), and it’s the central trifecta of story:
What do your characters want (goal)? Why do they want it (motivation)? What’s standing in their way (conflict)?
Where can you clarify the motivations, make them want more, and put more at risk? (GMC is tied to stakes! Everything is connected!) Are your characters making choices and doing things that drive the story, or are they being pushed around by the plot? A character can react to things and feel like they aren’t in control, but a totally passive character is hard to pull off without it feeling like something is dragging in your story.
What are the opposing forces in your story, the challenges your characters face, and can you make these forces tigher, clearer, and more powerful? This doesn’t mean everything needs to be life or death! But external and internal conflicts work together to create story and a sense of something happening (unfolding, changing, becoming) on the page. IS SOMETHING HAPPENING IN YOUR BOOK? Do you have a story, and not just an expanded and perhaps even beautiful, exquisitely crafted premise??? This is honestly the hardest part of writing (in my opinion!) and one of the biggest stumbling blocks I come across when reading manusripts. There’s sort of a story but also an awful lot of down time. It’s hard to make competing forces actually meet and explode — make sure you aren’t writing around your story but are actually telling it.
and why is it happening in your book?
Tension
This is a feeling of “what happens next?” that you want your work to elicit in the reader, to keep them turning pages. It comes from having conflict and a sense of anticipation. There can be something the reader wants to find out, or is curious about, or wants to know more of. Even when it’s something concrete in the story (“who’s the killer?” “will they diffuse the bomb in time?” “will they get together by the end?”) there’s also something ineffable and more internal. There are writers who could write about taking out the trash and I’d read every word of it. Have you woven together every component of narrative to make the reader consistently engaged, no matter what your book is about?
Characterization
Does each character feel real? Multidimensional? Unique? Is each side character necessary to the story and pulling their weight? Who needs to be developed further? Who’s taking up too much air time and can be trimmed or cut? (Now we’re taking about pacing! Ah, more connections!)
Medium Picture
Start to do a little more fine-tuning as you go:
Themes
This is the underlying concept of the story, and it can be spelled out explicitly or more subtly woven through. I put it in the medium-picture section because it’s not always apparent from the beginning—I know that for me, themes are something I discover more of as I keep working on a book and deepening the characters and plot.
Description
This includes setting, time period, characters, and world-building (whether you’re making up a world or starting with a real one). Does every component feel vivid and real, as in the reader believes in what you’ve created on the page? Where do you need more description, or less, or more focused and precise detail? More isn’t always better! See my post on the work that description does in a narrative.
Dialogue, language, and voice
What’s the point of view of the narration? Is it consistent, interesting, enjoyable to read, and is it conveying what you want? Once the bigger building blocks are in place, go through each scene and draw out more nuance, complexity, and intrigue. I often will block a scene in place, and then go back and completely rewrite it—I’ll know that two characters need to talk about the big conflict between them, say, but the first draft will be clunky and they’ll say all the wrong things. I still need that scene, so I’m not cutting it altogether! But I’m making it better by focusing in on what needs to be said and how it needs to be said, now that I have a better understanding of the book overall.
Make smart additions, and even smarter cuts
So much of a story comes in what’s not said. Where can you make thoughtful cuts to leave more space for interesting nuance, important ambiguity, the shadowy sense of characters withholding, or questions that bubble to the surface? If you have three good descriptions, would it be more powerful to have just one great line? Are you overexplaining or telling the reader too much? Are you solving problems too quickly, so all the tension gets zapped?
Cut backstory, info-dumping, and any place the forward momentum of the narrative stops to convey information. Weave these pieces in — and be honest and ruthless about what you don’t actually need! (Some more on common problems with backstory is here.)
Deepen what you have
Sometimes there’s not enough going on in the story, and you need to add more — more plot, more conflict, more tension, more narrative threads, etc. But the answer isn’t always to add in another plotline or a separate conflict or something else to create that tension. Sometimes the answer is right in front of you, already embedded in the story you’re telling, and the next move is to draw it out more and work with what you have. Before you add another conflict, have you fully developed the one you started with? Before you add another character or a plot twist, have you used your existing characters and storyline to their max?
Fine-tuning
This is when you zero in on the level of the sentence, and more detailed work.
Go back through the checklist on the micro level
Everything that applies to the big picture applies for each chapter and scene. Check the CMG, the tension, the world-building, the stakes, the themes, the pacing, etc. getting ever more specific. Revising is like climbing a pyramid. The things you’re looking for don’t change, but you start looking through a microscope rather than a wide-zoom lens.
Language and word choice
This is similar to the note above about dialogue and voice, but again, you’re getting more detailed. Check your verbs, your adjectives, your use of description, your overreliance on phrases you repeat too much. Find the right word for each moment. Cut any word that isn’t serving the story.
Keep an open mind.
Just because you think you’re fine-tuning doesn’t mean you won’t still make discoveries! The more you fine-tune, the more you may start to realize that, hey, the scene you thought you needed is actually kind of repetitive and unnecessary, or the chapters that are each laying out part of the plot can be consolidated without losing anything essential. You aren’t too far along to go back.
Get honest about those nagging voices in your head.
That scene you aren’t quite sure about, but that no one has mentioned in their feedback? The plot point that sounds off when you explain it out loud, but you swear is working in the book? Look at it again. Do the work. Your future self will thank you.
I guess by now it’s clear I haven’t written so much of a checklist as a reminder of all the key components of writing. But that’s what revising is—not adding some other element, but a process of refining what you already know about writing and applying it more deeply and more thoroughly to what you’ve already written.
Here are some more actionable items you can do to help you pick up on these components:
Create a reverse outline to get a better handle on what you’ve written and to see the redundancies and gaps.
Read your work aloud. Record yourself reading, and then play it back to yourself.
Change the font, print it out, send it to your e-reader — anything to defamiliarize the text and trick your brain into thinking you’re reading something new.
Let the manuscript sit for long enough that you can come back to it with fresh eyes. This doesn’t mean let years pass, but a few weeks or months can make a huge difference in your perspective.
Open up a separate document to draft a new scene, or rewrite something in a different way. This can take the pressure off of making the new material fit what you already have, and can open you up to new and better possibilities. The you that’s revising this ms isn’t the same you that wrote it—especially as more time passes, you write more, and your writing inevitably improves!
Don’t hold on to something that you wrote just because you wrote it.
If you’re feeling stuck on a story you’ve lived with for a while, imagine you’ve just thought of your idea and are plotting/planning it for the very first time. What would you do to make this idea come to life? How would that new story differ from the one that you wrote?
Take a walk. Take a shower. Have a dance party. Eat something delicious. Laugh so hard your stomach hurts. Be kind to the you that wrote your first draft, and excited for the you who’s going to take this manuscript to places you can’t yet imagine, because you haven’t written yourself there yet. For more on revising, see this post on how to tackle the process.
I hope this helps, and keep writing!
Kate
This is a truly awesome list!