What Exactly Is My Revision Process?
I mentioned I was going through struggles with the revision process in my last post; but what exactly does my revision process entail? I’ve watched countless videos on what other authors do for their revisions, so how have I adopted some of their recommendations and made them my own? By creating a five part process.
The first part doesn’t even start until the first draft is complete. To help me vomit out all the words, that in traditional first draft fashion are atrocious, I don’t even have my spelling and grammar checker on. I honestly can’t spell to safe my life, so if I drafted with the checker on, it would be far too distracting. So, after setting the draft aside for a bit, I turn the spelling and grammar checker back on and read the whole thing. I’ll fix the spelling mistakes as they come up, but that’s it. Absolutely no changes are made. Instead, I highlight sections and add comments about what needs to change, what doesn’t make sense, or things I flat out don’t like any more. In some cases, the list of comments is longer than the pages of the chapter. This is also where I take notes on what areas I need to research a bit more on.
The second part of the process is the most labor intensive. This is where the bulk of the edits are made, all based on the comments from the first part. I’ll also fix some of the grammar mistakes, but not all of them. Those are taken care of during their third part of the process.
It’s this third part I find to be the most obnoxious. This is where I go through the newly revised chapter, highlighting all the filter, weak, and crutch words. Each instance needs to be looked at and either be removed, changed, or justified in keeping. This is also where the grammar errors are taken care of.
The fourth part is probably the most fun, and not only be cause it’s the last step for an individual chapter. It’s during this stage where I listen to the chapter. Remember how I can’t spell to save my life? That flaw makes yet another appearance here. I can’t tell you how many times a word might be spelled correctly so the spell checker doesn’t catch it, bit it turns out to be the completely wrong word! Listening to the chapter catches all of these.
The final part of the revision process I’ve designed is to read the whole thing again, from start to finish. The main focus is to look for inconsistencies that may have been missed or changed in later parts of the book. This is supposed to be the last run though before being sent to Beta Readers, so it’s vital to get it right.
It’s a time consuming process, but it’s one that I’ve found works for me.
