I have nearly finished the outline for the Revision of Black Magic 1.5.

I can’t say how relieved it makes me feel to type those words.  I think one of the hardest parts of writing a novel is looking at your own work and deciding what needs to to fixed, and how it should be fixed. Any monkey can put together original characters in an interesting world and dance them across the page.  The hard part is polishing that monkey turd until it shines.  

In my case, I’ve found that having an analytical, structured approach to this stage of writing has been key.  I think it’s this lack of structure that has stopped me from finishing books in the past, even though I have completed rough drafts for something like 3-4 full novels.

I know some people claim to be able to do this kind of revision on the fly, but I remain skeptical.  I just don’t see how you can do a proper revision without being able to look at the whole novel at once.  But perhaps that’s just because I have yet to meet a heavy “plotter” whose work I would care to emulate, and if you’re going to be a discovery writer, you kind of have to Revise.  Heavily.  It just comes with the territory.

Since I’ve noticed that some of my friends seem confused by what I’m doing, and I think it might be helpful for other authors like me, here’s an overview of my plan-of-attack this time around:

First Reading

In this phase, I simply read through the draft, taking notes about anything that seems off, paying special attention to “big picture” things like saggy character arcs, plot holes, missed opportunities, potential symbolism, etc.

If I have an idea for a solution to any problem I find, I jot it down, but if not, I just note that the problem exists, since I know I’ll be coming back later to brainstorm solutions.

For Black Magic, one of the most interesting parts of this process was seeing places where I COULD have done something interesting, but didn’t notice it the first time through.  Without giving too much away, there’s a big reveal at the end of the book regarding one of my characters… It turns out that they are not in any way what they seem to be.  The thing is, I didn’t come up with that idea for that character until I had almost finished this draft.  So, one of my jobs in this stage was to watch for places where what I originally wrote didn’t properly foreshadow that final surprise!  

This time, I also made a few lists as I went, for later reference.  I wasn’t sure it would be useful, but it turned out to be an invaluable reference in later stages. I suspect I’ll want to track different things for different books, but for the sake of sharing, here are the lists I made for Black Magic:

• All characters (no matter how small their role)
• All notable items that need tracking (Walter kept losing his glasses!)
• Any world-building elements that need to be introduced to the reader
• Every physical location that shows up in the book

Analysis and Organization

The very first thing I did for this stage was to skim every scene to be sure that it actually had all the “elements” of a scene.  This is an idea I got from Holly Lisle, and you’re probably better off checking out her book about writing scenes if you are curious.

To summarize, I make sure every scene has an interesting conflict between a clear protagonist and antagonist, in a clearly defined setting, and that the scene ends when something important changes.  This sounds obvious, I guess, and maybe other writers struggle less, but making this a separate step has really helped me to drill down to the source of problems I noticed while reading.

For the record, my personal demon for Black Magic has been that Walter and Sky like to go off in the corner and chat.  At the time, it seemed like necessary exposition, but in retrospect, this was probably the most boring way to handle it.  Why?  No conflict!  I guess that’s what I get for having two of my protagonists be academic types.  (J/K, academic-friends, you know I love you!)     

At this point, I had a big stack of notes on things that needed to be fixed or tweaked, so I had to put my analytical skills to work.  For the first time ever, I actually put together an Excel spreadsheet with EVERY note, ordered by type and location. I also separated them into story-level problems (i.e., the solution will require touching multiple scenes), and scene-level problems.

I found as I worked through this that I had “repeats” in several places, but that wasn’t the most interesting part of this process.  The best part was that because I organized things this way, I was able to quickly identify where I had multiple seemingly-unrelated issues that could easily be solved with one small change.  I think this is going to save me a lot of headaches in the long run!

Planning the Revision

This is the step that I am almost done with, and it has been the hardest part of this process. I think the reason is because this part requires engaging both your creative and analytical brains at the same time.  I’m pretty good at switching between the two when I need to, but not so great at doing both at the same time!

However, making the spreadsheet did help tremendously.  Scrivener also turned out to be a lifesaver.  Basically, I used Scrivener’s “notecard” functions, and simply went through my issues one at a time, reordering cards, inserting scenes when needed, and making notes on each affected scene about what needs to be done for the revision.

Once an issue was “fixed” on the scene notecards, I highlighted it in the spreadsheet.  This way, I could skip around in the spreadsheet without having to worry about missing something.

Right now, I only need to finish the planning for Act III, and I’ll be ready to move on to the next step. 

Cut, Paste, and Rewrite!

You guys know what this looks like.  This is what most authors are talking about when they say they are “revising.”  However, I’m predicting that this step will be a lot less headache-inducing for me than if I had tried to dive right in, since I’ve done all the hard “brain work” already. Right now, I can see at a glance what work needs to be done on any given scene, without ever leaving Scrivener.

Next steps…

Right now, I’m thinking of this as my “first pass.”  I don’t have a carefully thought out process for the future, but my general plan-of-attack looks like this:

• Second pass: Polish prose, dialogue, descriptions, and all other sentence-level “stuff”
• Third pass: Send to first-readers for feedback, and revise accordingly.
• Fourth pass: Send to editor for proofreading and revise accordingly.

Anyway, I know this probably wasn’t very interesting to people who aren’t authors, so thanks for sticking through this with me. I do hope this break-down might be useful for another author out there, somewhere.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I have always struggled with how to organize my thoughts during revision! I’m always interested to hear about how other authors tackle this beast. (Pssst…  That means I would love to see how you handle revision, if you care to add a comment below.)

Until next time!    Au revoir.