Revising in Phases

I used to try to do all my revisions in one pass. I’d gather all my feedback from CPs and beta readers, plus my own notes, and pull everything into in one document in the order the issues appeared in the book. Then I’d go through from start to finish and try to fix everything in order.

Lately, I’ve been doing it differently. I break it down and do several revision passes, each aimed at a different kind of revision.

This works better for me, because I don’t have to keep switching modes. Some people may have the right kind of brain to watch pacing in a scene and make sure the emotional stakes are coming through and cull unnecessary adverbs and clarify backstory points all at once. I, however, lack this power.

For the revision I’m working on now, I’m planning four main phases:

1) Structural Edits. Stuff like combining characters, plot changes, shifted story or character arc focus, new scenes… things that affect the bones of the book. I’m doing these first because structural edits can wreak havoc on everything around them. Gotta knock out those walls and build those additions before you can polish the counters, or there’ll still be dust and chunks of plaster everywhere.

2) Point Edits. These are edits to very specific points in the book, usually from feedback. They include stuff like clarifications, line edits, additions of a thought or detail… anything that involves swooping in, editing a sentence or two, and then leaving for another scene. This pass goes after the structural pass because who knows if the line I’m editing will even still be there? But it goes before the make-it-pretty phases because sometimes when I’m parachuting in to the middle of a page with a point edit, I can wreck the flow of the paragraph without even realizing it.

3) Flow Edits. In this pass, I’m focusing on voice — both overall narrative voice and character voices in dialogue — and setting. Mushy-squishy, hard-to-define, subjective stuff where you really have to have your brain immersed in the flow and rhythm of the book and can’t be stopping every few paragraphs to make unrelated tweaks. While I’m at it, I can keep an eye out for places where those structural and point edits wrecked the flow or created awkwardness. I can smooth things out and make sure the prose is singing in tune.

4) Polish Edits. In this pass, I’m doing the nit-picky language type edits… cutting excess words, searching for and destroying empty words like “just” and “that,” eliminating adverbs that aren’t pulling their weight, that kind of thing. A lot of this will happen with searches for guilty words or even suspect punctuation marks. Hopefully I’ll still be able to stand looking at my book to do another full read-through checking out each sentence to make sure it’s well formed, too. This has to be a separate pass from the flow pass even though both are focused on polishing the writing, since if I’m looking at nit-picky details I can’t hear the music.

I hope to run it by some beta readers between either passes 2 and 3 or possibly 3 and 4, to get one last round of feedback before finalizing things, and to make sure I didn’t break anything too badly with the edits.

I’d be lying to you if I said I wasn’t intimidated by the amount of work, but I’d be lying to myself if I said it wouldn’t be worth it.