Why Revise?
The book you just finished is not the one you began. Just as in war where no plan survives contact with the enemy, no story comes out precisely as you conceived and planned it. Your subconscious mind took hold of the outline or notes with which you started and smoothed out the inconsistencies or implausible elements as you continued to write. It might have steered away from the original plot. Most of the time those changes are for the better, because you will have learned more about the story, the characters, and the setting as you went along, and your subconscious incorporated all that information into the manuscript. Once you were writing, any awkwardness you might have had at first settled into the style that the book now incorporates.
This book is not Writing 101. If by now you don’t know how to construct a narrative or use dialogue, you’re reading a manual on how to revise your book too soon. Many books in the Million Dollar Writing line (WordFire Press) will help you to write your book. Revision is needed once you have actually finished a manuscript. You can get the basics on plotting and story construction from those or numerous other sources, such as the Save the Cat! series by Blake Snyder, The Anatomy of Story by John Truby, Stephen King’s On Writing, Neil Gaiman’s master class, former SFWA president Cat Rambo’s brilliant online tutorials, Dwight V. Swain’s Techniques of the Selling Writer, and the long-running Writing Excuses podcast. Come on back when you’re finished and ready to revise.
Robert A. Heinlein, known as the “dean of science fiction writers” offered five rules of writing:
You must write.
You must finish what you write.
You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.
You must put the work on the market.
You must keep the work on the market until it is sold.
Hence, you have entered stage three, but instead of waiting for an editor to tell you what s/he wants, you are going to go over it and improve it yourself.
As a rule, most writers finish a piece before going back to revise. One of the chief reasons for that is going back over finished material and fiddling with it may distract them from going forward to finish it. Another is that as you write the rest of the book you may find that you need to change things in earlier chapters, nullifying some of your revision. Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather, had ten rules for writing. One of them was never to show anything unfinished to anyone, because it might cause you to doubt your piece. Have confidence in yourself, but confidence does not mean you are infallible, so it’s good advice to finish it anyhow. Thousands of distractions abound in the world. Your mind will retain more of the small details if you don’t allow a prolonged interval between beginning and finishing. If you had to put the book down for a while, it’s all the more important to go over it in detail now, to make certain your plot went where you intended it to, added all the small touches you wanted, and incorporate other interesting ideas that you have thought of since you last worked on it.
On the other hand, Dean Wesley Smith, author of over one hundred novels and editor of Fiction River Press edits as he goes, as does Timothy Zahn, bestselling author of the Star Wars: Thrawn series, and the late Gene Wolfe, author of the Book of the New Sun novels. It’s also my writing style. From long experience, we can go back without losing the energy of what we are doing. We don’t recommend this method for beginners, because it will interfere with the flow of creation and getting things down on paper while they are still fresh.
More common is the method used by bestselling author and publisher of WordFire Press Kevin J. Anderson, who will do up to seven revisions after he has finished his first draft. He continues to tweak and improve the piece over time, giving it that polish that his readers have come to expect.
Above all, we want you to finish what you write, as in Heinlein’s Rule Two above.
Don’t overwork your story so much that it gets stale. You have to learn when to let it go. Yes, there will always be errors of which you are aware. Almost no one else will ever see them. And, yes, as you are walking back from the mailbox looking at your first copy (as I did), and you will open it to the page with the one and only typo on it. Relax. All you need to do is make your book the best you can now while retaining the enthusiasm you put into it while writing it.
If you have the time, put your finished work aside until you’ve forgotten how you wrote it. That could take a couple of weeks to years. Most people don’t have that leisure, so you will have to set your writing mind aside and assume your editorial side. Bestselling writer and teacher Michael A. Stackpole says, “When you edit, you are in a different place than when you write.” You do have an editorial side—you used it while writing when you made grammatical and word choices. Now you’re going to put it to work full-time.
First of all, set aside all distractions and read the manuscript through. Try not to see things that are not there. Pretend it’s someone else’s book. You must read only the words on the page. Jot down notes as you go. You want to record your first impressions as the editor. These are the things you will correct on the next pass. You can use Track Changes or other marking software to indicate places in the manuscript that will receive further scrutiny later. If you prefer to work on hard copy, print it out and use a pen of any color than black so your edits will be more visible.
An important reason to read your manuscript straight through now is to spot repetition. When you look at it with fresh eyes, you will see where you might have repeated a phrase, a description, or even a whole scene that you had written then rewritten, but not deleted one version or the other. Make a note to go back to those. Your helpful subconscious will begin to make decisions about them, which you can incorporate later.