Revisions Do Not Mean Writing A New Manuscript

I wanted to talk a bit about revisions today. I have several authors who are knee-deep in the middle of these right now so I thought it an appropriate topic. This is going to be one of those posts, however, that will be filled with a lot of "IF YOU" statements.

Revisions, as we know, are a necessary evil. As much as we would hope it to be the case, your story WILL NOT be perfect after the first draft. Critique partners, agents and editors will all find something you missed along the way. This means going back to work on that story and making those changes so it is ready to go to those editors, contests or to the readers after the editors have gone over your story.

Now, IF YOU have spent time planning your story ahead of time, these revisions are not going to be as troublesome as you think. The odds are, you caught a lot of those issues as you worked through that first project. Those of you flying by the seat of your pants as you were writing probably were not catching those mistakes.

I will also add that IF YOU were thinking as you wrote, the odds are you were already spotting areas that you and your agent or editor are probably going to want to fix. One of my authors, when she sends in her story to her editor already provides for her a list of about three things that she knows might be an issue. Does she want those to be problems? No. In fact, she is always hoping the editor comes back with, "No, everything is great." Most of the time, the editor comes back with an agreement of the issue but has already come up with some potential solutions.

The next bit IF YOU deals with your ability to see solutions. This is where you have to be a strong writer and someone who can see all of the small and large elements of your story. In this case, you have to understand how all of the parts are working together in your story. For most writers, however, they see only the plot. They see only the words on the page in front of them, and not the writing on all of the pages before or after.

Finally IF YOU are someone who can multitask, revisions should not be an major issue. This also connects to that prior point. Let me explain how one of my authors works. When she goes through her story, she has two documents open. One is her "CLIP BOARD" where everything she cuts goes to that document. As she works through the story and cuts things, she already knows if this is something that can be moved to another place in the story or if it just needs to be eliminated. To do this successfully means that you have to essentially think of two stories at one time.

As the title suggest, revisions does not mean starting over. It means attacking ONLY the problem areas and not massively over-hauling everything in the story. To do this, though, requires a trained author. And, as I have pointed out a lot in the last several posts, requires time and education.