Want to know how to take your novel from first draft to fabulous?
Read on for my step-by-step guide to revising a novel.
This month, I’m dwelling in the revisions cave, revising the murder mystery novel I wrote for Nanowrimo, last November.
Taking a book from first draft to polished manuscript ready for submission to agents or editors is a very different skill to writing it in the first place, something I’ve been reminded of time and again during this process!
The more complex the story, the more likely it is that it needs some serious revision. No book ever comes out of our heads exactly the way we pictured it. Thoroughly revising a novel is our chance to get it there.
As with all things writing related, there are as many different ways of revising a novel as there are authors. But I’ve always found it helpful to learn how others do things, before adapting the ideas that appeal to me into a system that works for my writing.
This blog series is written in that spirit: I hope you find some of it useful, and that you’ll try out the parts that resonate with you. But feel free to disregard anything that doesn’t!
Disclaimer given, this is how I approach revising a novel.
Read all the posts in the Revision 101 series
The Revision Outline
I do most of my writing, revising and editing – up to line edits, anyway – in Scrivener. If you haven’t tried it or heard of it, I highly recommend checking it out (see their videos to find out how it works).
For me, the biggest advantage is the ability to set up my novel by scene, with an index card to represent each one, and spaces for notes about each one. (There are masses of other cool features, like colour coding, snapshots, collections – not to mention the compile feature that lets you put it all back together again at the end, but we’ll stick with this for now.)
This works for me because, before I had Scrivener, this is how I used to do my first draft outlines and my revision outlines – on old fashioned index cards, usually colour coded.
You could do this next exercise on actual cards, in Scrivener, in an excel spreadsheet (I’ve done that too) or whatever works for you. Basically, you need a system that lets you organise your book by scene, make notes, and colour code. It’s up to you what that system is!
Writing Exercise
Making your revision outline
Using the bullet point outline you wrote from last week’s blog, alongside your original scene by scene notes from your first draft, it’s time to figure out exactly what you want your revised novel to look like.
The beauty of planning all this out on scene cards, rather than digging straight into your manuscript, is that when you change your mind about what order you want scenes to come in, or what happens in them (and you will) you can just write a new card, rather than unpick changes you’ve already made.
So, for each scene, write a card with the following details on it:
- Your scene sentence (what happens and what changes within the scene)
- The conflict (A vs B)
- The setting and time
- A few notes on how this scene needs to change from the first draft to make it work
I like to colour code my revision scene cards, by how much work they’re going to be to revise.
I use:
- Red or pink – totally new scene
- Yellow or orange – more than 60% changes
- Green – 30-60% changes
- Blue – 0-30% changes
The Revision Outline
Use your logical next actions to get these scene cards into order, and you have your revision outline!
So, it’s time to start revising, right? Not quite. There’s a few things you need to do first.
Writing Exercise
Check Your Arcs
- Does your story start and end where you wanted it to?
- Are all your big turning point scenes that you identified in your big picture in there?
- Do you tie up all the main story conflicts?
- Do your main characters change through the action to become the people you want them to be by the end?
Check Your Timeline
- Does time pass in a logical manner?
- Watch out for impossibly fast journeys or missing chunks of time
- Make sure you’ve got your backstory timeline straight, too
Write Your Don’t Forget List
This is the last thing you’ll do before starting your revision, and the first thing you’ll reread every time you sit down to work on it.
Basically, this is just a short list of all the overarching things you know you want to change or improve in your book, that you don’t want to forget in the moment. Since I’ve already made detailed notes on what changes in each scene, I usually use this for more overarching details that I want to seed through the whole book, or character changes I want to ensure are consistent in every scene.
Phew! That was a lot of prep work, and I know it can be frustrating to realise that after all that you still haven’t actually revised the book. But you’ve done the hardest work, I promise.
Now you just have to work through your plan! Which is what I’m doing right now.
Take it scene by scene, and don’t second guess yourself. Trust the plan, and make the changes you’ve written in your outline, until the book you have truly reflects the book you wanted to write.
Good luck!
P.S. Planning on taking part in Camp Nanowrimo this April? Check out my post on how to write 50,000 words in a month.