writing is revising...right?
on my approach to revisions, featuring my organized-chaos outlining method
Coming off the heels of an intense revision (yay, Blood Red Poppies draft 3!), I have to admit the magic of writing truly comes in digging deeper and deeper in each draft.
In today’s post, I’m going to talk about my approach to revisions, mainly how I kept myself organized amidst adding multiple subplots, intensely reorganizing/rewriting sections, and digging deeper into emotions and my world-building.
I’m also linking a template of my google spreadsheet for revisions—feel free to make a copy if you find it useful!
Disclaimer: this is just my personal process! It’s not for everyone, and there’s no right way to revise!
part one: digesting feedback
Reading feedback the first time is always such a gut-punch. In that first moment, my immediate reactions often are “my book is garbage” or “you just don’t get this story.”
So my first step in the revision process is: close the feedback document.
Skim it, get the general gist—feel sucky—then revisit it later. After even a few hours away, rereading the same feedback feels completely different. It’s easier to realize “actually most of it is complimentary” and “this identifies a central problem” and “this is just their personal opinion.”
part two: organizing feedback
After rereading feedback, it’s still incredibly overwhelming, especially if you have multiple readers. It feels like there a million things to do.
So my second step is to organize all of these disparate comments into categories. During this process I’ll find a lot of issues fall under the same umbrella, and noting problems that are raised repetitively helps to identify what needs the most work.
Here are the categories I use:
Stakes/Motivations: this is the driving force, the reason there is a story to tell, and is (in my opinion) paramount to making sure the story is compelling.
Plot: I arrange according to chronological sequence, usually by acts.
World
Characters
General: stuff that doesn’t fit into other categories; probably are smaller issues.
When organizing, I start by moving the most extensive feedback letter/doc into my spreadsheet and sorting them into problems and suggestions from betas, without writing how I intend to resolve these issues. During this, I group similar issues together.
After that, I generally feel better—okay, things are grouped, instead of 1000 problems I have 185—and then assign an importance level to every problem through color-coding:
Essential: this must be fixed first, as it has the potential to affect the entire story.
Important: could create a chain-reaction; resolve after essentials before moving on.
Ignore: things that don’t fit the story I want to write.
part three: brainstorming & challenging what’s already written
Next comes the difficult part: filling in the solution column. I try to hit the essentials and importants first, aside from fixing easy little problems, but otherwise there’s not much advice—except to those who, like me, tend to cling to a particular scene flow.
If you do this as well, or are finding it difficult to contemplate making substantial changes, here are a couple things I try to keep in mind:
What’s important is the heart: I used to worry big rewrites would mean I’m twisting a story to adhere to feedback. But actually—without losing the spark to marketability—revising is all about finding the heart of a story and presenting that. Individual scenes are irrelevant to that. I’ve rewritten an entire book before and am so glad I did it; I can’t even remember the early drafts now.
Don’t be afraid to put in the hard work: If there’s a problem that needs fixing and your main worry is this takes too much work, I want an easy fix—which happens to me a lot—put down that urge mercilessly. It’s possible a problem doesn’t need that much work. But if it does, the easy fix always comes back to bite my ass.
part four: reverse outlining
After brainstorming, I change my color-coding of the problems/solutions list to reflect whether I think a problem affects an entire act or only select scenes (see above pic). It helps me remember how much focus a thing warrants as I move into outlining.
I then create a reverse outline of the current story consisting of act synopses, one-sentence scene synopses, and scene summaries, that I put into my spreadsheet:
Thus I move into outlining the first act (my brain can't handle more than one act at a time), moving from broad outlines to scene details:
By now I usually have a good idea how each act needs to change, so I flesh out my act 1 synopsis (making edits in a different color so I can see the original).
I check my first sheet for act-relevant problems, and input them into the scene-by-scene sheet, categorizing by subplots/threads/world-building/etc I need to track.
Then, I edit my one-sentence scene synopses until I’m happy with the new flow.
Next, I figure out what elements to bring out in each scene, in the same row as the one-sentence synopses. For instance: antagonist secretly suspects MC in scene 4; do x world-building in scene 2; drop hint in scene 5.
And finally I move into my detailed scene summaries, using color-coding and strike-outs to annotate additions and deletions, as well as the world-building, backstory, emotions, and foreshadowing I want to bring out in each scene.
Outlining my revisions in this sequence helps me tofigure out the big direction first. It also helps with layering world-building and backstory, especially when complicated subplots are involved. I’m an overwriter, and this also helps me avoid repetitions.
part five: actually doing the thing
My method of implementing changes varies from draft to draft.
For draft 2 of poppies, I retyped everything with the first draft open on the side, to force myself to reconsider every word, and it really helped improve my prose.
For draft 3, I used my previous words, but first made annotations in ALL CAPS or dragged words around / deleted words to fit the new scene flow.
Inevitably there are scenes that just don’t click, even if it begins and ends within a scene flow that makes sense. I’ve noticed the main reason this happens for me is I’ve become too focused on pushing events instead of having events stem from the characters’ emotions/motivations and overarching stakes. Going back and digging into emotions generally always improves a scene for me.
After writing the actual words and completing the act, I then:
Return to my revision spreadsheet and create a list of things I need to track through the act and run through to check for continuity (wounds/scars, layering world-building, etc).
I also (as I draft) color-code paragraphs for world-building, emotional development, backstory, and foreshadowing and do a pass for each element. I only do this for act 1-2, since the world-building and backstory development is more complicated.
Wrap up with line edits, but the intensity and necessity depends on the level of finish I’m aiming with that draft.
And that concludes my revision process! Though it’s so tiring, at the same time it’s so rewarding to bring out the heart of the story more and more with each revision.