That was fun, right? You got it all out, left no story stone unturned? Get ready to throw most of it in the dumpster and set it on fire. The impulse here is to believe that you have created a work of art. You are going to just start carefully reading through it and fix the typos, reword that awkward sentence, and fix all the dialog attribution so it is perfectly clear who is talking. Unfortunately, that is all in the Finalization step. Skip this Revision section at your own peril.
Distance
I know you want to publish as soon as possible so the money can start rolling in and you can tell your boss to take their job and shovel it. The key part of Revision is taking a step back, letting the story rest, and looking at it with a truly critical eye. Forgetting about it for a month or two is not an unreasonable request. Start work on your next story, get started building your author website, do some unrelated research.
Perhaps the best use of this downtime is to read other novels with a very analytical eye. How did they approach the story? Linear or flashbacks? First person or omniscient? Highly descriptive or mostly dialogue? How did they break it down by chapters; scene by scene or large mileposts? Did they name their chapters, giving the reader clues along the way. Was there plenty of foreshadowing, or were you completely surprised by the twists? What was the total time of the described story? A day, week, year, lifetime? Was anything necessary missing? Was there anything that could have been cut out without noticing the loss?
Now that you have gathered all of this information, did the author make good choices? How else could they have done it? Would it have been better in the first person? Maybe it would have been more interesting coming from the point of view of a best friend. What if each chapter was a change in the point of view?
Could you have written their story better? Perhaps. Now you have some distance, perspective, turn that same critical gaze back to your precious first draft. Break it down as you read through it. If you wrote it from an outline, update that outline with important details that were added, including all the changes. No outline? Create one retroactively. Print it out and look at it. Does it have all the necessary beats? Does it have a natural, entertaining rhythm?
Developmental Editing
I’ve heard many opinions on the difference between ‘editing’ and ‘revising’. They all boil down to this – “Revision is making large changes and editing is small corrections.”
However, nobody calls it revision any more. The current term most commonly used is ‘developmental editing’, I assume from the point of view of a professional publishing house editor helping the author develop a monetizable story. This differentiates it from copy editing and line editing, which most people I know would call proofreading.
The terms you use are not as important as the concept. In my experience, the most accurate phrase would be first draft autopsy. A self-(developmental) editor needs to cut open the thoracic cavity and pull out all the organs of their precious story. You need to examine, weigh, dissect each one until you fully understand all of the minutia that once was your story. Then, with all the organs spread out on the examination table, you have to reassemble it in a way that makes it better than it was before.
Experts can do this analysis and correction in a single pass. It will take you a dozen tries to get it right, but it won’t be right because the seventh way was better, or was it the fourth? You have lost all sense of how your story will work. You give up and pull the ice cream out of the freezer and grab a spoon… no bowl necessary.
Wait! Here comes a methodical book to help solve your problem. Save the Cat! Hero’s Journey. Story Grid. Virgin’s Promise. Anatomy of Story. On and on they march. Each one promises to save you by showing you the map and guiding you to the treasure buried at the X. You read it and try to apply it to the Frankenstein revision that is stumbling around your writing laboratory. After a few frustrating weeks, you are back to the ice cream.
The books’ solitary message is YOU need to understand STORY. Pretty much every human instinctively has since they were children. It is how elders effectively teach the necessary wisdom to the next generation. It is a feeling deep inside. You know it for sure when a story is presented to you with a major flaw.
Developmental Editing is feeling those flaws, refusing to ignore them, and finding a better way.
The methodical books can give you tools to break down what you have, look for what is missing, and build it into… a standardized trope filled story. That isn’t a bad thing. That is what readers expect so that is what will sell.
What it will do is damage your creativity. This is why there are professional editors. They save the writers from the soul-sucking task of performing the autopsy.
My breakthrough came when I accepted I would never be a good editor. I chose to once again apply the creator within to overcome. Step back from the story and start looking at the big picture. You wrote it in first person. What would it look like in third person close? You gain insight into other characters, but you lose some of the compelled mystery. If you could write it again from scratch, what would you do differently?
Summary
Can you summarize your story in a sentence or two? The so-called elevator pitch is a necessarily reductive dismissal of all the depth of your story. It will help you find the true focus of the story which should reveal what belongs, and what does not.
Hunger Games – A girl offers her life in sacrifice to save her younger sister and ends up bringing down a corrupt government.
Kiss The Girls – Can the villain be the least likely suspect?
Silence of the Lambs – I never want to eat fava beans again.
Pillars Of The Earth – A man dreams of building a Cathedral and this pursuit triggers the downfall of a monarchy.
Payoffs
Did you hint at something in the earlier chapters and fail to explain it? Some authors call this ‘making promises’ to the reader. You don’t want them to reach the end of the story and wonder why you added all of the detail about a character you never heard from again.
Character Depth
Make a list of your characters in order of importance to the story. Does the number of sentences about them match this ranking?
Alpha reader. They’ll read the typo filled shit show and tell you what is wrong, what is missing, what they didn’t understand.
Book Length
Genres have generally accepted standards for the length of a book, usually measured in the number of words.
As of this book revision, these are the following word counts per genre according to Self-Publishing School
Contemporary Novel 60K to 90K
Mystery 50K to 80K
Romance 50K to 90K
Sci-Fi/Fantasy 50K to 150K
Horror 40K to 80K
When do you know your Revision is done? When you can’t stand revising it any more. The most important words you will have to learn are ‘Good Enough’.