Revision happens best when you have a specific goal for your revision. Figuring out what your theme is, what your novel is about, is essential. Once you have your mission statement, you can start to put your chapters and your scenes up against that statement and see if they align.

Revision means seeing again. It doesn't mean playing around with commas. It means kind of having these large-scale insights, and then making sure that they are reflected in the actual manuscript.

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transcript for novel revision tip

Hi, this is Mary Kole with Good Story Company and I have some novel revision tips for you. We will discuss some here and to continue the learning, you can join me in Good Story Learning, our membership.

But I do want to get started right off the bat with this idea of figuring out what your theme is, what your novel is about because once you have your mission statement, sort of a premise, your focus on character and plot, if you can put it together in a one or two-sentence statement, you can, as I've said in another kind of revision videos, you can start to put your chapters and your scenes up against that statement and see if they align. And if they don't, that chapter, that scene might be a really good candidate for trimming down.

Now, you want everything to be cohesive with the theme of your novel, but not necessarily on-topic. Because if you only roll on a specific topic, if it only had to do with the central plot, the novel might come off as a little bit one-dimensional with nothing else going on. You do want to allow for some kind of elements of fun to happen in your novel. You do want to weave in subplot. Ideally, the subplots do speak to that theme, that overall sense of what this novel is about, but they don't 100% have to always align because, again, you don't want to get a really, really narrow focus.

Now, revision happens best when you have a specific goal for your revision. Otherwise, to sort of think about trimming down 350 pages to, you know, really rearranging things, changing characters, changing voice, making plot revisions that you want to do, that can be really overwhelming, and I don't think a lot of writers can keep all those balls in the air at one time. So, a lot of people get very distracted by moving commas around, kind of the sentence-level revisions, and they don't enact the bigger changes that are necessary in a particular manuscript. And this can get really problematic if there's something that you need to change, you know you need to change it, but it's just easier to focus on the sentence-level revisions and enact those without making the bigger changes. I think writers do love to write so, you know, the argument would be, well, you can make these changes. You want to do it. You want to have the strongest manuscript possible before you go out on submission, for example. But I think a lot of writers, it's not laziness necessarily but they want to see if anybody else calls them out on a problem, especially if you know in your gut that there is a problem, before they invest that time in revision. I think, and I hear it all the time with my editorial clients, if you know that there is an issue with a specific project, tackle that issue. And tackle it in a big way. Revision means seeing again. It doesn't mean playing around with commas. It means kind of having these large-scale insights about your manuscript and then making sure that they are reflected in the actual manuscript rather than, you know, in an outline somewhere.

And so, one of the things that I recommend is doing this kind of reverse funnel. So, you zoom way out to your mission statement, then you apply this kind of large-scale changes at the outline level. You write an outline for your novel. And then, you kind of start moving things, moving chapters around, moving scenes around, deleting scenes, deleting chapters. But it's okay to go in multiple rounds. One of the questions that I get asked about revision the most is, you know, "How many rounds of revision is within the range of normal?" And, of course, it's different for everybody. But what I really want to communicate to you here is that it is completely normal to sort of do a plot revision, for example, where you may call the changes to the plot that you know it needs, and then character revision, you make all the changes to probably the main character in one go that you know the main character needs. But then, you might even do separate revision rounds for your antagonist, for any major secondary characters, and some tertiary characters usually fold in somewhere within that process. But it's not just one round of revision where you try to tackle everything. And then, once all the big moving pieces are where you want them to be that you start paying attention, then the funnel is at its widest point. You start paying attention to the sentence level, to your turns of phrase, to your description, to your dialogue, to voice. Voice is usually one of the last things that falls into place when you are revising.

Now, there is this idea of kind of getting additional eyes on your project and having that be a big part of your revision. We will talk a little bit more about that, continue the discussion over in Good Story Learning. My name is Mary Kole. This is Good Story Company. And here's to a good story.

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