A Five Point Plan to Revising—Including My Big Tip!

Everyone has their own approach to revising and for me each book is a little different, but I’ve developed a general five point plan.

      1. Print first draft and read through. Reading it on paper gives my eyes a break from the computer screen, plus I think you notice things you'd miss otherwise. Though I make obvious word corrections, I’m mainly looking at big picture, identifying areas that need to be developed more fully. I mark the margins with words like, More, Build, Revise, Cut, Move

      2.  I make those kind of big changes in the second draft.  If the book is a time travel, I then divide the scenes/chapters into past and present. This way I can read all the past scenes in a row and all the present scenes. I also did this with my last wip where I switched POV, separating the male lead scenes from the female lead scenes. Reading these separately high lights if one of the plot lines/POV is weaker than the other and where to strengthen. 

      3.  The third pass is for sentence strengthening.  I watch out for words like, Look, Watch, Seem, Glance, etc  and rework the sentence to make them stronger. Also passive word structure. I’m not opposed to all passive verbs, sometimes they sound more natural and work best, but often a tweak can make the sentence stronger and tighter.  Ie: change “He was removing his jacket as he entered the building” to “He removed his jacket as he entered the building” or “As he entered the building, he removed his jacket.”

      This is a good time to watch for shrugging characters. Characters shrug, we all shrug, and I don’t think we should stop our characters from shrugging, but sometimes there are different actions they could do, or adding an action to the shrug can add interest. 

      Detail  and Sensory Check.  Adding details to a scene can make all the difference between a flat read and something that pops off the page.  We want to see, taste, smell, hear, feel what’s going on.

      4. Time to check for dialogue. This is where I make sure dialogue sounds natural and that all characters sound unique. It’s easy for our characters to all sound alike in the way they talk and even easier to have them sounding like us! One way to check this is to do a FIND for one of your character’s names and read through all their dialogue. Do this for each main and strong support character. 

      5.  And now for my Big Tip: Post it chapter by chapter on a private blog.

What do I mean by this?  I got this idea when I participated in a couple blogfests last year.  We had to post one scene from our ms on our blog for other people, strangers, to read.  These people didn’t know what came before or what came after. The scene had to stand on its own. When I read it this way, with a blog reader in mind,  suddenly there was so much I could do to make it stronger.

In Blogger it’s easy to start a new blog.  I’m not sure how it works with other blog sites, but I assume it’s similar. In Blogger you go to Dashboard, then Create Blog. Pick a template, then go to Settings and set Add Your Blog to Listings and Let Search Engines Find Your Blog to NO. Under Settings is a Permissions tab. You should be listed as the only blog author.  Under Blog Readers, click ONLY BLOG AUTHOR.  Now this blog is private.

I cut and paste one chapter from an open word doc (of course I have it saved elsewhere in case things go awry,) into the new blog post window and then push post blog. It’s amazing how different your ms looks in a narrower column, different font and non-white back ground, and how much you catch that you didn’t see before when you picture it being read by someone else.

When I'm satisfied, I cut and paste the revised chapter back into my word doc.

That's my basic revision plan. How about you? Do you have a certain technique that works for you?