I’ve come to love the editing process. Sure, the first draft is an unforgettable joyride. But it usually takes me a few drafts to discover the juiciest, most memorable parts of my story.
Staying focused and motivated long enough to get to those “eureka!” moments, though, is a huge challenge for my brain. In honor of Revision Summer, I’ve pulled together the three biggest editing blunders I’ve made, along with some tips on how you can avoid them.
Let my pain be your gain!
Mistake #1: Polishing prose too early
The impulse to spend time making sentences pretty and dialogue snappy is irresistible for me at every step of the editing process. It makes sense: Fixing all those clunky lines and cliched descriptions feels like I’m doing important work. The heartbreak comes when I spend a year polishing my first three chapters into bookstore-ready gems, only to realize I have to delete them entirely because they don’t work with my new ending.
My biggest piece of revision advice is this: Let the writing stay rough until you’ve locked in your main story beats. This will save you months of toil and gallons of tears. Once you have a beginning, middle, and end you love, that’s the perfect time to go in and make your prose sparkle.
Mistake #2: Telling myself I’m too busy to work on my book
Even when I’m on a revision roll, I’ll cheerfully set aside my manuscript if something more urgent comes up.
Spoiler: Something more urgent always comes up.
And once I’ve been away from the project for a few weeks or months, my connection to it starts to fade. I feel guilty about not working on it, but getting restarted again feels too tiring to even contemplate.
The truth, though, is that it’s surprisingly easy to get your revision mojo back. Just opening your manuscript and reading a single page can be all it takes. Before you know it, you’re tinkering with a paragraph and adding a few margin notes. And then you’re off and running again.
I’ve come to realize that no matter how busy I think I am, I always have a few minutes to poke around on my revision. That’s been a game-changer for my momentum and overall creative happiness.
Mistake #3: Giving myself the wrong kind of deadlines
When it comes to deadlines, I’m a classic Obliger. If someone asks me to do something by a certain date, I’ll move mountains to make it happen. If I give myself a deadline, though, I’m going to blow it every time.
This was one of the big reasons I started NaNoWriMo back in 1999. I knew that dragging friends along on the noveling journey would make me much more likely to keep writing when the writing got tough. The fear of embarrassing myself in front of people I admire is a very powerful motivator.
It took me a lot of abandoned drafts to realize I needed that same public accountability in my novel revisions. Two years ago, when I felt myself losing momentum on a long-suffering sci-fi novel, I hired a developmental editor to read it. The book was a total mess, so we picked a delivery date three months out.
I made more progress in those three months than I had in the previous three years.
I (sadly) can’t afford to pay someone every time I need a toothy deadline. Thankfully, volunteer beta readers can perform this same life-saving function. An insightful friend who loves the kind of story you’re writing can solve plot problems in minutes that you’ve been wrestling with for months. But more importantly, knowing someone you care about has blocked out time to read your book will motivate Obligers to finish that draft in ways no self-set deadline can.
I’ll share more thoughts about choosing beta readers next month! In the meantime, if you have a revision project that’s stalled out, I hope you’ll go play around in the file today. Getting your editing groove back only takes a few minutes, and the world needs that book!