Notes on Revision
Some thoughts on Round 2!, that first real round of revision after one has assembled a decent first draft.
I read, this past Wednesday night, to some students at Bennington College. During the Q&A, somebody asked this question: how is one to know when a book is “done”? It’s a question I’ve heard before, in workshops and classes, in other people’s Substacks (see below) and books on craft. Still, I am not sure how to answer it! I muddled through some kind of reply. Basically, I think, I said, I don’t know?, and, It’s specific to the project, and, You just kind of feel it?, and then rambled for a while about the very reassuring experience I happened to have with my beloved editor at Scribner.
Unfulfilling answers, all.
What I might and maybe should have done is directed that student to this useful piece by Courtney Maum.** But, to be honest, I have been feeling pretty soured, recently, on the whole capitalist-optimist orientation of publication-as-goalpost, of market-as-gauge-of-quality. Like the Ukranian TikTok witches who’ve been casting death hexes on JD Vance, I’ve been feeling that feminine urge to turn inward, away from empire, toward something more ancient and innate.
(**For a refreshingly anticapitalist take on art-making in this marketplace of a world, see Making Human by Maria Bowler.)
Of course, I want to sell this book eventually! And to do that I must make it comprehensible. Enjoyable, even! A book is made of language, and language is connection (among other things). Still, before I trust this manuscript to the market, I owe it my most open, thoughtful, ruthless, witchy scrutiny. Scrutiny of the thing on its own terms, not the terms of even my own beloved editor. Not the terms of the market.
The truth is I don’t know how other people decide their books are “done.” Which I put in quotation marks because, if you’ll allow me a moment of side-eye, a lot of ostensibly finished books—books that have been edited, bound, and published, with lots of pretty blurbs on their backs—often feel undercooked to me. I have felt finished only when, after many years of work, I’ve read and reread my manuscript countless times, and found (A) that I could think of nothing else to do with it, no area that felt accidentally underdeveloped, no end left unwittingly loose, and, (B) that it left me short of breath, with a prickly feeling all over, proud and apprehensive and somehow transformed. And even then, there’s a non-zero chance—a perhaps more like one hundred per cent chance—that, fourteen or so months after publication, I’ll be doing a reading from the damn thing, in front of an audience, and I’ll feel like, The fuck is this nonsense? How did I ever think this was done?
So the more useful question is, I think: How to work toward completion?
And the answer to that is: Revise.
Because, these past few weeks, I have been at once deep in revision, and in teaching mode (I’m halfway through a monthlong craft class for One Story; perhaps I’ll share some takeaways here when it’s done), I thought it might be useful to share a few thoughts on the revision process.
What follows is all I currently know about ushering a book into its final stages. A qualifier: if you are not a writer, you may as well skip this post, as you will very likely find what follows, just, eye-blisteringly boring. Even if you do happen to be a writer, you might find this piece completely navel-gazing and unhelpful! Everyone’s process is different and I don’t claim to hold the keys to any kingdom. I share my revision process here only because I do sort of feel like some writer, somewhere, who finds revision daunting and scary, could conceivably copy these practices and end up with a better draft of an unwieldy long-form project than she had before.
A month and a half ago I completed a first draft of my third novel. What that means to me is that I worked on and revised, in turn, each of the book’s nine sections, as one would a short story, in Scrivener; painstakingly compiled them into a Word document; and then spent a few weeks going through that document from beginning to end, editing / revising as I went.
That initial round of editing (Round 1!) was somewhat haphazard and cursory, in part because I knew I’d be doing a lot more soon enough. So while there were times when I spent a painful hour on one wretched paragraph, trying to get it to say what I wanted it to mean as honestly and precisely as possible, without vagueness, hyperbole, shorthand, or cliché, there were other times when I sort of skimmed, because I was tired or in a rush or just thought, in the back of my head, I’ll come back to this. The main goal was to smooth out the edges of the manuscript, fix obvious errors, make the thing shapely and clean.
When that draft was ready, I sent it to a few very kind friends who were willing to read it and offer feedback. I spent a couple of worried weeks waiting. During that time I did not work on the book at all. I felt nervous and awkward. I wrote approximately two paragraphs of a short story, which remains unfinished.
Then the feedback started to trickle in, in its various ways. One friend and I had a long phone conversation. One sent an email with a Word doc attached, as well as marginalia in her document. Two shared their notes with me over dinner. None of these modes of sharing feedback was better or worse than the others. Each is specific to its reader, her approach, and her current bandwidth.
As I digested and synthesized what these friends had to say, I began to compile this feedback—and, in some cases, my reactions to it—in several ways: I added tracked changes to a new document titled something like [novel3]_Draft2.docx. These tracked changes included the most valuable notes my friend had added in her marginalia, a few section-specific notes from her and other readers, and a few notes of my own, mostly reminders to myself to come back to certain sections in my next round.
Meanwhile I’ve continued adding to a separate, running tally of revision notes in my Notes app. These bulleted notes, organized by chapter, range in specificity from the mechanical (e.g. changing a couple characters’ ages by two or three years) to the existential (e.g. exploring more thoroughly the cumulative complexity of my main character’s grief), and their provenance is unimportant. Some are ideas from friends, others are my own. They make up a constantly evolving list, practically as old as the novel itself. Sometimes I’ll add a note to the list in the middle of the night, only to delete it the next morning because it makes no sense. Sometimes a note will hang out in the list for only a few days before being implemented in the manuscript and then deleted. Other times a note will linger in the list for months or even a year before it is deemed irrelevant and deleted. One goal of revision process is to get to the equivalent of inbox zero, which is to say to delete every note, either because it has served its purpose or because it has eventually proved unnecessary.
I think I’ve mentioned this in previous Substacks, but plenty of my notes to self originate as Voice Memos. I can’t understate the usefulness of Voice Memos as a tool for working when you’re not working. Ideas tend to visit at inopportune times (e.g. on the drive to school pick-up, during bath time, in the middle of the night), when it’s not always possible to get out the old phone or a notebook and pen and write or thumb-type them out. Periodically, when I have a moment, I sit down and transcribe every Voice Memo, keeping what feels valuable (I add those to the running tally in Notes), and discarding the rest.
When I say valuable I mean an idea that feels relevant to where I want to take the book as a whole, or offers some useful framework through which to return to and transform the book into something more urgent, honest, and complex.
It is at this point that the second round of revision (Round 2!) officially begins. Round 2!, historically and currently, involves painstakingly re-importing [novel3]_Draft2.docx from Word into Scrivener, section by section, paragraph by paragraph, or even sentence by sentence, while consulting my constantly evolving list of notes and addressing each comment in tracked changes. At the time of writing this Substack post I am 4,511 words into this process; this draft is around 116,000 words. Put another way, I’ve reached the end of the second subsection in a novel which is currently 49 subsections long. If my math is right (it probably isn’t!) I’m approximately 4% of my way through the book. Yesterday morning I spent nearly two hours on one godforsaken paragraph, and I’m still pretty sure it is crap. So, you know. I don’t use the word “painstaking” lightly.
All to say. It is slow. Sometimes it is terrible. But, stop! you ask. What is it!? What do these painstaking changes to the manuscript actually consist of?? Let me step back, here, and try to name just a few approaches to revision that one might use, in Round 2!.
First: another qualifier. Approaches to revision are infinite. Mine is certainly not the only Substack tackling the topic (Danielle Lazarin has some very good stuff to say about revision in Talk Soon), and probably some of what follows is stuff you’re already thinking about. That said, here are a few, specific ideas, arranged from micro to macro:
Delete. For instance,
Murder cliché. Not just every dark and stormy night, every eye that lights up or glazes over or is as black as night or blue as tritest summer’s day (though, obviously, destroy those, too). Every yawn of a description can be understood as placeholder for something more alive. Reread to expose that past version of the self who was, to some degree, half-assing it, phoning it in, writing in language that came not fresh from her own brilliant brain but from ad copy for moisturizer or a bad novel she read years ago in the library of library her grandma’s assisted living facility. Let our prose not be colonized by cliché! Let it be fresh, alive, and free!
Destroy useless dialogue. Every instance of “yeah,” “uh,” “like,” “um” is wasted real estate; every time one character agrees with another, adding nothing to the conversation; every “maid-and-butler” moment, when the characters are being used by the writer to sum up plot or rehash backstory, rather than being allowed to speak for themselves. Every line of dialogue can be its own one-line play. Less is more—unless more is more, and if more is more, overwrite with abundance! BUT—
Annihilate redundancies. When we read for meaning, rather than to be intoxicated by our own poetic prose, we often find a ton of repetition. Two sentences may live three paragraphs away from one another—or maybe they’re right next door—which, if worded differently, essentially mean the same thing. Both cannot survive.
Replace. For instance,
Whet the vague into the sharp. We write to understand what we mean, so very often the bulk of the material in a first draft is vague, groping prose which never quite grasps the deepest essence of the matter.
Interrogate exposition. This one’s a classic. First drafts are rife with long sections of exposition explaining stuff or offering backstory which is often better conveyed in scene. I am far from a “show, don’t tell” purist. Sometimes a long section of exposition is just what the novel wants, to slow things down, let the characters rest, and give the reader something to mull over. Interrogate these sections, is all I’m saying. Some of them, at least, will probably have to be replaced.
Conversely, it’s frequently necessary to add new material.
E.g. in my current revision I spent about a week on a new scene concocted to reveal something, early in the book, about my main character’s sexual ambivalence, feminine rage, and repression. I was reluctant to convey this information in exposition because (A) the novel is already exposition-heavy enough!, and (B) the narrative voice is a very close third, and these qualities are ones of which she is semi-unaware. The purpose of this new scene is to reveal to the reader what the main character cannot or is unwilling to see.
Inevitably, when one rereads, one finds certain hints, in the manuscript, at various material which does not exist. It might be implied, for instance, that one character has a grudge against another, but in the current draft the reasons for that grudge are absent. When I revise I often find objects that feel somehow charged with narrative meaning, but whose cameos feel random and unimportant. E.g. in this revision, it is mentioned that the central couple finds a blue and yellow quilt draped over a stranger’s front gate, being given away for free. Why that mattered to me when I wrote that scene, I do not know, but when I read it again, I liked the quilt; it seemed to be invested with a kind of semi-magical narrative charge. In revision, I brought the quilt back many years later; their daughter sleeps beneath it. Few readers may notice it, but for me it helps establish a certain coherence for their world through time.
Ensure that each individual scene succeeds, locally and globally. In a recent Substack, Brandon Taylor discussed at very good length the idea of a story’s “situation.” The whole piece is excellent, do read the full post, but the bit that really resonated for me was this:
There is the large Situation which governs the story itself, and then there are local situations of character and scene which more rapidly change and alter in response to character situation. We might call the larger, more stable Situation governing the story at large as fate, destiny, or even social position.The work of a scene is to alter a situation in some way—be it the large Situation of the story or the local situation of scene and character. The scene has not come off if the situation remains unchanged.
After reading the above, I realized what my first chapter’s “situation” was—and that, in my first draft, it remained unchanged. I never want an opening chapter to exist merely in order to introduce the novel’s characters and big, overarching themes. I want each chapter, especially in this book, to be a little story in its own right, each scene to function as an alteration of both the local situation of each individual chapter and the global situation of the novel as a whole. To that end,Take note of and refine the manuscript’s natural rhythm. I’ve referenced the intensely structured quality of my current project several times here. It is written essentially in eight chapters made up of six two-to-three-thousand-word sections, plus one chapter made up of one single section at the end. I recognize that not everyone works within constraints that specific, but I do believe that every novel has a certain overall shape it will wants to take, as well as an innate natural rhythm. A manuscript might flow best near the beginning, but fall apart in the so-called saggy middle. It might build slowly in short bursts of prose toward an ultimate, third-act climax. The goal is to observe and dissect the sections where the book reads most naturally. Detect, if you can, what shape it wants to take, and use that information to guide choices like length, density, flow, and cadence.
There are certainly more approaches one might take in a second round of revision. There are questions of order and chronology—should this foundational moment come earlier in the book? Should that climactic scene be pushed back?. There are questions of interior character complexity; characters’ exteriors (the shape, size, and evolution over time of each character’s body); and vividness of setting. I’ve found it’s often useful to do one’s rounds of revision attuned specifically to elements like these later in a manuscript’s life cycle. Which, honestly, who knows how long that could be?
Until next time,
Rachel x