Revisionasaurus Rex: Tips for Taming the Beast

I’ve finished my very first book—definitely a cause for celebration. When I did, I broke out the wine, called my best friends, and bought myself something nice as a reward. But as great as it is to finish your book—you know that you CAN finish a book, which is an accomplishment in itself—too much celebration is premature. You’re likely facing several waves of full-on edits before you shop it around, get an agent, and get it published. In short, your work is only barely beginning.

I’m in the editing stage now. The Revisionasaurus Rex can take over your life—editing can drag on for years, much longer than it takes to actually write a book. But if you want a writing career, you can’t afford to spend several years editing—you want to get your book market-ready as efficiently as possible, so you can get your writing career started. Here are a few tips for taming the beast.

Break it up into manageable segments. It’s empowering to watch your word or page count creep up while you’re writing your first draft. But when you’re editing, goals can be a little more ephemeral. You’re not increasing your page or word counts, as you might be deleting and rewriting large chunks as well as writing new scenes from scratch. So you can’t keep track of your progress by volume alone.

Still, it’s important to keep track of your progress. It makes you see that you’re MAKING progress—which helps to keep you motivated. You can create excel spreadsheets, graphs and charts if you’re so minded—but if you’d rather keep it simple, just keep track of the number of chapters you’ve revised. If you don’t have your draft divided up into chapters yet—mine won’t be divided into chapters until after this round of edits—count by scenes.

Work from an outline. I’m a big proponent of outlining. After I finished my first draft, I printed out the whole thing, read it, made notes of where the plot was weak—and re-outlined the whole thing. Now I have a structure to go on. I feel that outlining is even more important during the editing process than the first-draft writing process. That’s because with the first draft, you’re flying by the seat of your pants—but in the editing process you have to clean up your plot and make sure your pacing is right. Without my outline, I’d be lost.

Talk it out. By the time I finished my first draft, there were holes in my plot that I could drive a Volkswagen Beetle through. Those plot holes screwed up my editing process for months—I just couldn’t figure out how to fix them, and it made me lose enthusiasm for the story.

Then one night I sat down with a friend, who is also editing her first novel, and told her about my plot holes. We’d hashed out a solution in the space of a few hours and a few glasses of wine. Pretty soon I had a renewed interest in my book—and the editing process has been much easier since then.

Set a deadline—and stick to it. Your book will never be perfect—and you can languish in the editing process for years or decades. Don’t let yourself do that. Pick a deadline. Pick one you can stick to, but not without significant effort. Pick a few people you plan to show your book to after this round of edits. Tell them you’re planning to give the book to them on that date—and get it done.

Editing isn’t easy. Your editing process could hold up your career for a long time—but only if you let the Revisionasaurus Rex run rampant. With a little (who am I kidding: a lot) of discipline, however, you should be able to get past the edits and get your novel ready for submission—sooner rather than later.