Revision Breakdown Part 3: Doing the Deed

Making notes on the hard copy of my 2020 book

So, remember how last summer I was working on a series of blog posts about my revision process? I got two posts into that three-part series and then got busy, and... um... never finished. Oops.

Since it's better to post a year and a half late than to never post at all, here is the final step in my personal revision process! You can refresh your memory of the earlier posts if you want:

Part 1: Writing my own edit letter
Part 2: Mapping out my story

Once I've mapped out my story and written my edit letter, I break my revision down into manageable chunks.

The way I break a manuscript down really varies from revision to revision. Typically, I start with the big things first—the "plot changes" or "big changes" from my self-made edit letter. I prefer not to start with smaller details, because sometimes the bigger changes might alter things enough that my original list of smaller changes is no longer accurate.

For some revisions, I read chronologically through the book from beginning to end, working each chapter to make several big alterations. (This, for instance, is what I did with my second book with HarperCollins; by the time I got my edit letter from my editor it had been about a year since I'd worked on that book last, and I had enough big-picture changes to make that I knew I needed to read the whole manuscript as I worked.)

For others, I take one big change at a time and go through the whole manuscript working for places to implement it. This is how I revised Where the Watermelons Grow—I'd read it fairly recently and had a fairly clear idea of where I needed to make specific changes.

I often do a lot of back-and-forth-ing as I work on these big revision passes; a new scene here means altering an older scene to be consistent, etc.

Once I've worked my way through my whole list of big changes, I turn to the smaller ones. (Sometimes—when I have a LOT on my revision to-do, which is not uncommon—my lists are split into "big," "medium," and "small," and I go in that order, from big to small.) Often, these are changes I can implement using tools like the "find" feature in my word processor—searching for specific keywords, overused phrases, or scenes I know I need to change but can't remember what chapter they occur in. For instance, if I've decided to get rid of the references to a specific school, I can search for every time I use the name of that school and then rework the paragraphs around that mention.

This part of revising is by far the least set-in-stone, most intuitive portion. Often, I base the way I'm doing it on what feels most organic or least intimidating to me. For me, starting a revision inevitably feels like standing on the high dive, afraid to make the leap off; I try to begin with whatever makes that leap the least scary, or whatever I have the clearest vision for.

I typically don't work down my to-do list in order, either—I address points on the list in the way that feels the most natural. Often, different points on my list are related to one another, and I'll work on all of them in tandem before moving on to less-related issues.

For especially big revisions, I might end up reading through the manuscript beginning-to-end twice. With my second book (out in 2020), I read through on the computer as I made my big changes, and then printed the manuscript and read through the hard copy after I'd finished, so that I could have a better grasp for the rhythm of the language and find smaller line edits that needed attention.

When I'm working on a revision, it always, ALWAYS feels like my book is turning into Frankenstein's monster, an unintelligible mishmash of old and new writing that feels completely doomed to being terrible. No matter how incoherent it feels when I'm working on it, though, I always find that the manuscript is much, much stronger when I'm done!