How To Revise a (Book) Manuscript

Photo by Susan Rigetti

I’m deep in the heart of a round of revisions on a novel that my agent and I are getting ready to submit. The revisions aren’t drastic, but they’re substantial enough that I’m planning my approach cautiously and optimistically. If I get it right, making these changes will turn the novel from a good book into (what I hope will be) a great one.

I tend to separate my writing process into several distinct phases.

The first is the creative and generative stage, or what I like to call the “I’m actually writing” phase. This is when I have some incomplete idea of a story in my head, and I’m trying to get it down on paper. It starts with a blank page, or with a note on my phone, or with a post-it on my wall, or with some confusing note that I scribbled to myself in the middle of the night that makes absolutely no sense. I may start with a scene, or a character, or a vibe. Sometimes, I start with a vague idea in my head of the kind of book I want to read that I tried to find at the library or in the bookstore but that just didn’t exist (in this case, I want to read it so bad that I decide to write it myself). The pieces slowly come together, word by word, sentence by sentence, painful paragraph after painful paragraph, until I have something resembling a draft. Then I try again. And again. And again. It’s still not a book in any sense, but something nearly resembling one And then, at some point, usually after the fifty-eighth draft, it feels like a book.

This is a critical distinction for me: draft vs. book. A draft can feel like a book, but it’s nothing something you would ever find on the shelves. It’s not publishable. It’s not complete. A book, on the other hand, is. It’s something I can imagine downloading from the Libby app, or finding on the shelves at a bookstore. It is a complete story I can play in my head from start to finish, like a film.

Once a draft becomes a book, I’m in the second phase of writing: the revision phase. I have a book here, but it’s not the right one. Usually, there are a thousand and one reasons why it’s not the right one: it needs structural changes, it needs character adjustments, it needs more tension, it needs higher stakes, it needs more romance, it needs x, y, z. Basically, there are weaknesses. There are ways to make it better. Sometimes, I read through the book, and I feel like it doesn’t capture the image I had in my head. Sometimes, it did capture what I wanted it to be, but I see ways it can be better. Other times, it’s just “okay” or “fine” but I want it to be a more powerful, compelling, creative narrative. However, I often don’t know exactly what I need to do to make the book better, and this is when I bring in other readers: friends, family members, my agents, my manager, editors. My circle of readers often spots the things that I can’t see: weaknesses, strengths that can be even more powerful, moments that don’t hit like they should, characters that need to be brought more to life, scenes that don’t make sense, pieces that are missing. (This is why I try not to share incomplete draft-phase manuscripts with others — it’s not useful to get feedback until I’m at the book phase of my creative process.) Then I need to actually revise the book — to take it from where it is now to what it needs to be.

At this point in the process, I’m always tempted to jump right in to the word doc and start hacking away, sentence by sentence. I’ve written enough books by this point that I’ve learned that this is the absolute worst thing I can do. If I’m in the weeds of the grammatical problems and the question of whether I have too much dialogue or exposition or whathaveyou in this specific sentence on this specific page, I’m doing absolutely nothing to turn this into another version of a book. A book is more than its sentences. A book is more than its stylistic peculiarities. A book is a thing, an object in the world. Put another way: Somewhere in heaven, there’s a platonic form of this book that I’m trying to imitate, and what a revision needs to do is not change the details of the imitation, but reach a different platonic form altogether.

So now I’ve learned to step back before I start typing and tapping furiously on the “delete” key. I think about the book as it is now, the platonic form of it, and the book it needs to become, keeping it clear in my mind that those are very different books. I usually have a crystal-clear idea in my head of the platonic form of the current book, and what needs to happen at this stage is constructing in my head a crystal-clear idea of the platonic form of the new book. Then, and only then, can I go in and hack away at the words until it resembles what it is supposed to be. And what I have found time and time again is that if I have a clear, unambiguous idea about what the new book is supposed to be, then revising is easy. It’s time consuming, and painful, and stressful, and awful, but it’s easy. I know what the book needs to be. I know what it is now and what it needs to become. It’s only a matter of making the necessary changes.

I made a video about this the other day when I was sitting at the barn waiting for the pony’s food to soak. I was sitting next to the tack room, working out the details in my head about what this new version of the book will be, trying to get it clear in my head so that when I sat at my computer I would be able to get to work and make significant progress right away. I thought this might be helpful for others who are writing: