First Stage of Revision: Complete
Congratulations! If you've followed me this far into your revisions, I'd bet your draft is better than stories that are out in the world right now, making money.
For the project I’ve been revising during this month, I’ve done two full read-throughs (and it’s a romantacy series of about 195 k words) and I still have about three notes left to go back and revise. One is to write some additional framing stories that will bring the second book closer to the word count of the first. The other two notes are spot-checks for details that I want clarified before I move into my second stage of revision.
I have a functional draft. I’m telling the story I want and it’s doing a lot of the work that it needs to.
Woo-Hoo! Celebrate! We’re half-way there!
I think I will always feel like there’s more to cover with structure, character, and plot. The fact is that it’s possible to run a weekly writing course and talk about nothing else except structure, plot, and character. These big-picture items are so important to have in place and lots of people who know more than I have spent time talking about these fundamental building blocks of the story.
But at some point, you’ve read through the draft (probably multiple times) and you’ve got the structure where you want it, the plot makes sense, and the characters are motivated and resonating. And it’s time to acknowledge this draft is doing what the second draft needs to do.
You have reached the fuctional part of your draft!
After you finish your first read-throughs, you’ll have settled on the big picture ideas of the novel. You know exactly what story you have told. If you're someone who's just taken notes on a read-through and not changed any of the text, now is the time that you go through and write these changes. If you’re someone who rewrites as you go, you might want to give your synopsis another perusal to make sure you didn’t change anything that introduced a new problem (I am so guilty of this).
Either way, you should definitely revisit your pitch materials at this time. You ought to have a draft of the synopsis, a query blurb, and a one-sentence pitch written by now. If you don’t have that work done, now is the best time to get those thoughts down. In a couple of months when the revision is complete you can revisit these drafts and fine-tune a poorly written pitch. But in a couple of months, if you try to write that material, you might not have as clear a picture of the whole story anymore.
We’ve finished now with all the big-picture thinking and from here on out, it’s going to get granular. The next stage of revisions will focus more and more on individual details (like atmosphere, point of view, pacing, dialogue, and word choice). You will lose sight of the bigger work as a whole because you're about to get real deep into the details.
So take a moment at this stage and do Future You a real solid. Write a pitch, blurb, and synopsis.
At the end of your first read-through/first revision pass, you should be confident in confident in your draft and ready to begin looking at everything on a scene-by-scene basis.
When you have finished your first read-through and gotten these big picture items in place, congratulations you have finished your first provision pass you already have a stronger story than most people when they begin to pitch. There are some fully published novels out there that have not passed the rigorous examination that you have now put your work-in-progress through. I'm betting that your draft is better than 20% of published books out there in the world right now.
If you ever feel disgusted by your revision, remember that bigger idiots than you have written worse novels and have gotten paid for it. There are hundreds of published novels with characters that don’t have arcs, with plots that make no sense, that leave readers feeling gross or underwhelmed at the very end because the story did not follow a satisfying structure.
Your story is not going to be one of those, because you’ve put in the work to address those issues. Be proud of the revisions you’ve made and have faith in the process.
Because the Rewrite is coming.
This is usually where I set the work aside for a few months, write something else, and come back. The first draft made it exist, this second draft made it function, and the third draft is going to make it excellent. But I might need a breather before I go into Stage Two of my Revision process.
Over the next couple of months, Lane and I are going to be working on a book together. My plan with this section of the substack is to write about that journey from the opening outline to the finish and then through the revisions. If that sounds like something you want to see, make sure you are subscribed!
And if you’re looking for a professional developmental editor or a book coach, I’m on Fiverr!