Revising Your Novel

by Waverly Fitzgerald

With so many Writergrrls participating in the NaNoWriMo contest, I'm sure there are many of you out there with a 50,000-word rough draft, wondering if you can (or even should) shape it into a publishable novel.

What to do after you finish your novel?

1. Set it aside and go on to new projects. Stephen King recommends at least six weeks in his book On Writing. Paul Park, teaching at the Clarion West Writers Workshop in Seattle in the summer of 2002 said, "The most effective rewrites come when you are cold to the work." I put my third novel under the bed after my agent sent it back to me. When I pulled it out a year later, I saw immediately that the two chapters in which I changed point-of-view had to go. After making those edits, I sent it back to my agent and he sold it within three weeks to Doubleday.



2. Ask at least three (I asked ten) of your friends to read it and give you feedback. Pick friends who love to read, know your genre and can be honest. You can ignore comments you hear from only one reader but if everyone has the same concerns, you need to pay attention.



3. Don't start revising until you have a clear vision of what you want to change. This may involve months of musing, reading similar novels, making notes or brainstorming with a writing partner.

After twenty years of teaching novel writing to beginners, I've seen plenty of first drafts and first novels. Often I find myself in the position of trying to persuade people to let go of their first novel and move on to the second. The first novel is so often a practice novel, a novel in which you are free to make all the mistakes you want, and figure out the consequences. (That was true of my first novel, which, fortunately was only read by my two best friends.)

You have major problems:

1. If readers tell you they don't care about the main character(s). That's the most common problem I see in first novels: the writer chooses as a protagonist someone they dislike or disdain (you can have a creepy or weird character but the reader has to care about them). Of course, you can fix this by making the main character more sympathetic, but your new character will make completely different choices and take different actions, so you might as well write a new novel.



2. If readers tell you they don't believe the plot. Although there are exceptions to this rule (some literary novels and experimental novels), the classic shape of the novel demands that plot events be connected in a cause-and-effect way, slowly gathering weight and complexity until the major trouble in the novel becomes as bad as it can be. This is not as easy to fix as it seems since the causal connections must be consistent and plausible for the characters. Again, you may find it easier to start a new novel.

Certain technical problems are easy to fix:

Start is too slow	Drop the first three (or more) chapters
Lack of suspense	Rearrange some events & revelations of the story Make the reader and the characters work harder to get answers to questions
Point of view shifts	Make sure you understand how POV works and be consistent
Too many characters	List the characters & their roles, then get rid of those that are redundant
Too few characters or events	Add a subplot

The easiest of all to fix: lack of description and dull dialogue. Don't get me wrong, it's hard to write good description and interesting dialogue, but it's easy to fit in after the fact once you've mastered the skill. A good editor can help you or study the writing of your favorite authors and consciously imitate them.

If you decide to revise your novel-and you might want to do this simply as a learning tool even if you have doubts about salvaging it-set up a deadline, otherwise you can revise endlessly. Some writers revise a whole novel in a month. I've spent almost a year revising a novel it took me two years to write.

Here are a few tools I use while revising:

1. Put the whole manuscript in one file. Then you can search for a character's name and see exactly what they said or did in the scene immediately before or after the scene you're revising. This helps with continuity.



2. Create a scene list or chapter summary so you can review the major plot points and revelations in a compact format. It makes it a lot easier to see how changes you are contemplating will affect the whole novel.



3. Print a version of your current manuscript and annotate it with your comments and those from your readers.



4. Make a checklist of changes you plan to make. Mine included decisions (what does Zoe do for a living?), enhancements to the theme, and "what if?" questions (what if I drop that subplot?). I went through my list methodically, then wrote specific changes into the annotated manuscript and the scene list. The more specific they were, the easier they were to make.



5. Don't throw away the pieces you remove. Put them in a separate file; journalists call this the "morgue;" I call mine "unused." If you discover you need that passage after all, search for a key word, copy the piece and reinsert it into your novel.



6. Do several passes of revision. Start with a "rough cut" to establish the events in each scene-then do a polish (where you focus on the word level) later. It's frustrating to spend hours fine-tuning a paragraph only to realize it's got to go.



7. When I'm doing a polish edit, I use a list of common stylistic flaws and search for problems like vague adjectives, adverbs and passive sentences throughout the manuscript.



8. In my final edit, I aim to eliminate at least one sentence in every paragraph and one page in every chapter. This arbitrary challenge helps me eliminate redundant words and unnecessary details.

Resources for Revising Novelists:

Maass, Donald, Writing the Breakout Novel
McKee, Robert, Story
Stephen King, On Writing

If you need an editor, check out the Editors Guild.

Web sites I visited while researching this article:
Crews, Larry, "Rewriting and Revising,"
Lisle, Holly, "How to Revise a Novel,"

Waverly Fitzgerald is a novelist, teacher and writing coach living in Seattle.