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.

On Sharing Your Work With Others

I'm very careful about who I share my novel with. I've learned over the years that getting the wrong feedback at the wrong time can stop a writer's progress in its tracks--and even make some writers doubt whether they have any talent at all. It's crucial to share at the right time, with the right people--and the people closest to you may not be the right people to share your work with.

Your first few chapters and your first draft are a particularly tricky time to share your work. Your work is essentially still in flux before your first few editing passes, and it's your first time seeking an outside opinion on your novel. Here are a few tips for choosing those all-important first readers for your book.

Share with people who know your genre. Not everyone will get what you're trying to do--and the first draft, which is usually quite shaky even for books that become strong later, isn't the time to test your book's crossover appeal. The idea with your first critique is to share with someone who can give you technical feedback on how to make your draft better--and they'll be able to help you better if they know the conventions of your genre. In addition, if they have a subconscious dislike of your genre, you might get some critique that has to do more with your genre's conventions--which you should adhere to, in most cases--than with your writing. If you can, choose someone for your first pass who is familiar with your genre--or at least doesn't hate it.

Share with people who know writing. You're likely to get more out of your feedback if you share with other writers--at least at first. They'll be able to give you solid, constructive feedback on how you build your characters, your plot, your tension and so on. I've shared early drafts with non-writers before and sometimes gotten comments that were vague and unhelpful, but also unsettling--they didn't like certain things but didn't know why. That's not to say every non-writer will do that--but a writer is likely to have a better idea of how to critique and provide a different perspective on how to make things better.

Share with people who will give you honest feedback--in a positive way. Don't share with anyone who feels the need to mark their territory. Some readers might feel like they have to prove their own expertise by dragging you down--and these are not helpful readers for any stage of your writing or editing process. Choose people who are supportive, positive, and believe in your talent--but who will give it to you straight in a way you can take.

Don't share before you're really ready. I don't consider myself ready to share my novel until I've finished it and gone through the editing process at least twice--until I feel it's as good as I can make it on my own. Before then, any chapter could change significantly as I hone my draft. There is no way I will share opening chapters of my book before I've finished the whole thing--until I've done a read-through, I have no idea what I'll keep and what I'll wind up throwing out, and the beginning stages are when you're the most vulnerable to negative feedback.

Sharing with a close loved one? Be very careful. Sometimes I take negative feedback very personally from people very close to me--people like boyfriends and family members. Your critiquers have to keep emotion out of their feedback, but as the writer you should take emotion out of your response--and I find that to be very difficult with the people I'm closest to. I share with trusted friends, but never with boyfriends--and I wouldn't unless the guy I was dating was an outstanding writer with a thorough understanding of the critique process, an awareness of my sensitivity and a real love of the genre I was working in.

The best critique partners--particularly in the earliest stages--are close, trusted friends who are also writers and understand the type of writing you're trying to do. Be careful of those whose critique will affect you strongly on an emotional level--including significant others and people who are relentlessly negative. And take all critique with a grain of salt--don't let one negative review lead you to give up. Most important of all, don't share before you're ready--make your project as good as it can be before you let it out into the world.

My Editing Process

So you finished your novel, and...now what? I know that for me, even though I've been writing since elementary school, the finished novel is uncharted territory. But I can tell you one thing: the work isn't over when you write your closing scene. Oh no: it's just beginning.

I thought revisions would take a ridiculous amount of time, but I'm finding I'm screaming through them--revising is much less arduous than writing. Here's an overview of my process--and a few tips to help you along the way.

First: take some time off. My first tip for the editing process is don't edit. At least, not for a month. A funny thing happens when you're in the end stages of writing a novel. You become myopic. You can't tell what's good, what's bad, and what's not working. Your plot has veered way off course and putting it back together seems like an insurmountable job. The reason it seems so overwhelming is that you're too close to things: you're counting individual leaves, and you need a forest's-eye view.

I took a month's break between finishing my novel and starting to edit. It made a huge difference.

Second: print and read. There's something different about printing your novel and reading it in hardcopy. It's more solid and real somehow, and details tend to stick in your mind more easily. I printed out my novel at home and put it in a large binder--no stapler or clip would hold that baby.

Your first draft, if you've done things right, is likely to be a big, tangled mess by the time you get done. On your first pass, you're looking for plot inconsistencies, areas where you need more development, and scenes that need to go in the "outtakes" folder. Read it through once, pen in hand, and make notes in the margins. Read it through again and make more notes. Get a sense of where your plot loses focus and your pacing lags.

Third: Re-outline. Once you're done, you're going to need a game plan to improve your first draft. I'm starting with a new outline--one that takes all my prior notes into account. I'm going through my rough draft, reading and digesting my notes, and organizing it all into a new outline that includes scenes that work and what needs to be added and subtracted.

Fourth: Rewrite. Once your outline is done, you're going to have some more writing on your plate--all those scenes you need to make your plot work. Luckily, you'll probably be deleting a bunch of scenes too--I'll probably delete about a third of the novel in "outtake" scenes. But it will be worth it for a streamlined plot.

Fifth: Repeat. I'm expecting to revise my draft several times, each time with a different focus. The first time, I'm focusing on plot. The second time, I'll focus on building romantic tension and suspense--make sure my pacing is on track. The third time, I'll focus on language. You may not be able to do everything you want in your first editing pass--so expect to go through it more than once.

Sixth: Send to a friend. Once you're convinced you've made your book as good as it will be, send it to a trusted friend you can count on to give you good, knowledgeable and insightful advice WITHOUT either a). tearing you down or b). giving only praise. I'm lucky in that I have several good friends I can trust with first draft revisions. The ideal first-draft reviser is knowledgeable about writing and knows their way around the genre you're working in. Ideally, you have more than one to draw on.

Seventh: Send to a less experienced friend. Once you've made revisions based on your friends' feedback, you need to see how your book will play in Peoria. Meaning: you need to show it to people who aren't experienced writers, but who might have the same opinions an outside reader would. You don't need to be as careful on this pass--your goal is to find out what people beyond your carefully chosen writing circle, people who maybe didn't even know you were writing a book, think of it. Take this advice with a grain of salt; you've gotten too far to let a negative review discourage you. But you may learn some useful things as well.

So, that's my editing process. I'm currently on Step Three. What step are you on?

Finishing My Novel: How I Did It

I finished a novel this June.

This is a huge step for anyone, but particularly for me. I've been writing novels my whole life. Invariably, I'd get to around page 100, decide I hated it, and stop. Usually I'd delete the whole thing in a fit of book loathing. Sometimes I'd come back to it in a year and realize what I was writing wasn't so bad--and wonder why I stopped. But I never felt inspired to keep going; by then I was onto some other idea, which I would eventually abandon.

Not this time.

So if you want to write a novel, here's how you do it. Or, at least, how I did it.

Set small, achievable, regular goals. When I started with this new novel, I decided I would write 2500 words a week. 2500 words is an easy goal for me. It's 500 words a day, with weekends off. Or if I don't have a lot of time during the week, I could do it in one determined sitting. I could do a lot more--and later towards the end, I found myself sometimes writing 10,000 words per week or so. But in the beginning, it was very important to me to set small goals that I could live up to.

It's key to set goals that are less than what you think you can do. That's because if you set a big goal for yourself and don't make it sometimes, you'll be setting yourself up for failure on a semi-regular basis. That gets discouraging, especially for perfectionist types. I can't count how many times I've decided I'd write an entire novel in two months and then quit after two weeks--because the goal was just too big. If I'd said I'd write a novel in a year, I might have actually gotten it done in a few months.

When you don't make your goals, don't sweat it. Okay, so this week aliens landed in your back yard, you gave birth to a litter of kittens and you had to have your toes amputated. Not the best time for writing 500 words a day, even if you get a break on weekends. Don't let it throw you off. Life happens. Just forget about it and keep moving forward next week. Don't try to write twice as much next week to make up--you can if you want, but don't try to force yourself and then freak out when you fail. It's just going to make it that much less likely you'll pick up your story again the week after. Keep the goals small. Keep them attainable.

Get some writing buddies. Writing friends are the reason I finished my story. They encouraged me when I was mired in self doubt, they told me my story was brilliant when I was sure it was a big steaming pile of monkey poo, and they made me accountable for my goals. If you're lucky enough to have someone in your life who can fill this role for you, you have much better chances of finishing.

Set inviolable rules. The one rule I couldn't break during the writing process was this one: NO going back. NO deleting. Whatever you write in the first draft stays in the first draft. I needed this rule; otherwise I'd go back and delete huge chunks and take my story in random directions. I needed to save the editing for the editing stage. Set whatever rules you need to set to make sure you finish, despite story loathing.

Don't rely on inspiration. I've heard those stories so many times, about writers who've had a compelling dream, woke up that morning, and written an entire novel in two days in a big spasm of inspiration. To which I say: GOOD LUCK. Inspiration is a funny thing. It's undependable. You never know when or where it will strike. That's great if all you want to do with your writing talent is write the occasional poem. But if you want to make a career out of this, you can't rely on inspiration.

Instead, have a plan. Sit down every day to make a certain word count. Follow an outline. Know where you're going. Don't wait for inspiration to strike before you'll sit down and write. You may find after you write a few hundred words that inspiration comes late to the party.

Writing a book is hard work. You need a plan, a schedule, and a few rules you can't break. You also need help--no writer really does it alone. But it's never too late to finish yours.