I work as a freelance editor. I work with writers at thousands of projects a year on the revision process. I provide revision services. Every writer that I work with and every writer out there, I want them to engage in their own editing, their own revision process, because I do believe that a lot of writing happens in rewriting.

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transcript for revision process

Hi, my name is Mary Kole with Good Story Company, and here is a short video about the revision process.

Now, full disclosure, I work as a freelance editor. I work with writers at thousands of projects a year on the revision process. I provide revision services. So why would I want to teach you the revision process for free and scare away business? It's not really an NBA move but that being said, I fully believe in the advantage of having a second set of eyes on your project. That being said, every writer that I work with and every writer out there, I want them to engage in their own editing, their own revision process, because I do believe that a lot of writing happens in rewriting. And so, the more that I can give you for that process, the better armed you are, the better your story is when you submit or when you come to someone like me, and the stronger your craft is overall. So, I think it's a total win-win-win, no matter how you look at it, and I'm not trying to be stingy with the knowledge.

So, the revision process, when I teach revision to writers, I try to get them to zero in on their mission statement. Now, some people call this a premise, a logline, a pitch. That language tends to be a little intimidating, especially early in the revision process, so I kind of say mission statement to soften that a little bit. So, what is your mission statement with the story? If I were to ask you what the story is about, usually the ingredients of that are the character, a little bit about the plot, and then maybe the theme. So, you touch upon all three in your pitch, so Percy Jackson might be a demigod, his journey toward self-acceptance and acceptance from his father Poseidon. You can throw that in there, just sort of give it that Greek myth flavor, you know, just kind of the main arc that your character goes on, maybe something that they're hoping to achieve for themselves, maybe something that they need to learn. Obviously, you don't want to do outright teaching with your stories because nobody wants to read a lecture. They want to read a good story well-told.

But, I think, theme is really important to this discussion of the mission statement. So, what I'm asking you to do by focusing on the mission statement is to sort of do a reverse funnel treatment of your story. So, you have your 300-page, 350-page novel, and now, you have crafted this mission statement which is maybe a sentence. The mission statement acts like a focusing lens on what you really intended to do. I'm picking my words very carefully for a reason. But then, you go through the manuscript itself. And what I would like for you to do, at first, is to sort of hold everything in the manuscript up to the mission statement and see whether it furthers the mission statement, whether it contributes to it, whether it doesn't really relate to it, or whatever. And one of the things that I really like to see is a manuscript that's streamlined and functioning very well, and kind of operating on all of your creative cylinders is one that basically fits the mission statement.

So, one of the ways to do this is to craft an outline. I am huge on outlines. And a lot of my clients that aren't natural outliners, they are pantsers or whatever, and we don't fault them for that, do come over to the sort of outline way of working for subsequent manuscripts, if they're not there already, because it just makes so much sense to make your mistakes in a 20-page outline, rather than a 350-page manuscript. So, I strongly encourage people who are doing revision, even if they didn't come into the process of writing the story with an outline, to then create a chapter-by-chapter or a scene-by-scene outline. And once you have the mission statement and the outline document, it becomes very, very easy to sort of hold each chapter or each scene up next to the mission statement and say, "Is this cohesive? Does this reflect the mission statement?" Maybe it is. It dovetails with the mission statement or maybe, if it's an antagonizing scene where the character, you know, tries something and fails, maybe it challenges the mission statement. And, you know, let's just say Percy Jackson tries something where he isn't true to himself and it fails, while that still relates to the mission statement of him trying to discover who he is, he's just not so successful in this scene. So, things can uphold the mission statement or they can challenge the mission statement.

You can also have things that are in there just for fun. If you follow the "Save the Cat" method for plotting, there's a Fun and Games section where you have things that are fun, or frivolous, or support the premise. You know, if it's Percy Jackson and we get some of these machinations between the gods, it supports the Greek myth premise that's expressed in the mission statement. It's only if you have scenes where you're kind of wandering around, the point isn't clear, there is a secondary character that you get to into that doesn't really support the rest of the story, that is where you can make some large-scale changes to your outline, to chapters you've written, scenes that you've written, because you realize that they don't really relate to the mission statement even tangentially. And then, once you have everything that's cohesive with sort of the main thrust of your story, you can start rearranging things at the outline to sort of try and adhere to a story structure that you like. And there are about a million story structures that you can study, from the three-act structure to sort of the emotional plot that I talked about in my book "Writing Irresistible Kidlit" to any of these, like the 15-point beat sheet for "Save the Cat! Writes a Novel" from Jessica Brody. There are many things that you can apply to your plot. It's easier to sort of rearrange those plot points when you have an outline.

So, if you aren't doing these two things already, then the tool for revision that I would like to gently but firmly push you toward are the mission statement, so creating this sentence or two about what your story is about at its very core, and then a chapter-by-chapter, scene-by-scene outline, and trying to weave those together, see what bounces out, and then you have a much cleaner sort of encapsulation of what your story is to work with before you're even messing around with the sentences. Because a lot of people who dive into revision at the sentence level before they make these large-scale changes, they are moving around commas that might not matter. And I really want you to be working smarter, not harder. The sentence level, you can mess around with at the very end of the process.

I teach a whole class on self-editing for writers. You can find it within the Good Story Learning membership site at goodstorycompany.com. But this is sort of my mission statement for revision and for writers that you can carry out yourself.

My name is Mary Kole with Good Story Company. Here's to a good story.

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