The Writing Lab, 18 April 2025
Revising, Part 2/?
One of the biggest observations I’ve ever made about writing is you need to work with what works for you. By this, I mean the art of writing is a very individual process. What works for me, or you, might not necessarily work for each other or for other people; or, it might work but in a heavily modified format.
In this spirit, this week’s writing lab is a continuation of what I began to talk about last month; namely, the task of revising. Where before I went over some of the basics of revision and how it fits into the overall writing process (spoiler; it might be the biggest part of the process), in this post I’m going to go over some basics of how I structure my own revisions and what it looks like for me.
On Revising, Part 2 (of ?): What should it look like?
As I mentioned in the last Writing Lab post, the revising process is something that can be repeated (theoretically) to infinity but (practically) for anywhere from between three to five “rounds” of revisions. Based on everything I said, I’m not set on giving you one hard and fast number you have to stick with all the time. One rule of thumb, however, might be this: Take whatever number or revision rounds you come up with and add one or two to it.
I like to keep track of what changes I make to a document and the differences that come with those changes. But, I’m a lazy person in that I don’t want to give myself a lot of extra unnecessary work. So, I borrowed something from the software world for this process.
I designate the rough draft of every manuscript I write as “Book Project (or whatever its working title is) 1.0.” Whenever it is time for me to start my revisions, I will make a duplicate of the file and then retitle it “Book Project 2.0,” thus letting me know this is the first version of a manuscript now being revised. When it is time to do another full revision, you simply make a copy of the manuscript you are working on and then retitle it Book Project 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, and so on.
What happens if you are making minor changes, or you are only concentrating on one aspect of the manuscript to review? Well, let’s say you decided to see if you didn’t retell a background story to one of your characters or your setting more than a half dozen times. Then, you might make a copy of your manuscript and title it something like Book Project 2.1 or Book Project 2.5. The convenience of this procedure for me is it allows me to make as many smaller changes to a story and I don’t run out of numbers to keep it straight in my head (ex., Book Project 2.5, 2.6, 2.61, 2.8, 2.812, etc.). On most electronic documents like Google Docs or Microsoft Word, it allows you to make notes on the document itself. I can use it to write down comments regarding any major changes to the manuscript.
Exactly what each of those revisions covers is another good question. There are those who believe you should try to look at every aspect of a manuscript in a revision. While I do think it might be a good idea to do this for your first revision, afterwards you might want to fix your attention to one big idea to address in each of your later rounds. Some examples of what some of these big ideas can be include:
Word count. There are plenty of advice articles on how big your manuscripts should be. The consensus is that genre books and most fiction should be under 100,000 words or less. If you haven't been watching your word count, that could result in a lot of sentences, paragraphs, or even scenes and chapters you must eliminate from your work.
You might think it's impossible to cut a 160,000-word manuscript down below 100,000, but trust me, it is possible. I wound up doing this for my first novel, The Holy Fool. That required a lot of scene cuts and me removing something of a subplot from my novel, but I managed it.Continuity issues. I remember a scene from the 1985 Arnold Schwarzenegger film Commando where a car is trashed rolling onto its side, Arnold rolls it right side up, and he drives away in a perfectly maintained car. You want to avoid similar silliness, which can come from calling one thing by two different names or having one thing in two different places.
In the process of writing my second novel, The Yank Striker, I changed the name of a soccer club halfway through my rough draft, so I wound up having to change pages of description1. It was worth it, but you must be meticulous when you do it.Other big ideas. Is your main character unlikable? Do you need to give more or less background to your story? Are there subplots that are just fizzling out? Is the pace of your book off, or it takes too long to get going? This is where your heavy lifting happens.
I would also add here although I truly believe editing and proofreading are an entirely different process and should not be undertaken under any circumstances until you are done with the revising process, I would attack it in a similar manner as I just described above. So, one review might just deal with spelling, perhaps, one might make sure you don’t have any sentence fragments, and another to make sure all the text is in matching format.
On the next writing lab, I’ll go into some of these processes I skimmed over above and discuss them in more detail. Along the way, I’ll also go into how I’ve used the revising process to make improvements for my books and writings before publication. See you then.
Also, I’m going to post a related Substack Note for this post, asking those of you with writing and/or revising questions to share them in the responses. I’d love to hear from you and maybe help you with that one project you’ve wanted to get you across the finish line.
See you then.
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The reason for this was due to my obsessiveness for research. I originally named the soccer team from the East End of London which recruits my main character, DJ Ryan, as Donchester FC. However, in speaking online to some people from England, they explained names with Chester as a suffix (meaning camp or fort) were not common in the East End area but those ending with Ford (meaning river crossing). So, Donchester FC became Donford FC.