You might think revising is a rough and rigorous ritual: a rigid writing desk, a ruthless red pen, a wrinkled brow, and seventeen cups of tea that regretfully go cold. You read and re-read the same wayward writing until the words wobble and warp, and no longer look like words at all.
But revising does not need to be dreadfully dull. A little silliness can shake loose the details your brain has stopped seeing and make you a sharper editor.
Fool Your Brain with a Funky Font
Have you ever read your story a billion times and not caught a silly typo? One reason is because your brain is actually too powerful. That amazing brain of yours works faster than your eyes. As you read, your brain predicts what the next word will be before your eyes get there. And, because you wrote your story, your brain already has stored what you intended to write. (This problem gets worse the more times you re-read something.)
The fix? Change your font to something visually different. This will force your brain to change its processing and look at the text in a fresh way.
Another way to trick our brain is to read our story backwards. Start with the last sentence of your story and, going sentence by sentence, reading your story from the end to the beginning. This can help you focus on the grammatical structure of each sentence as opposed to the narrative flow.
Slip a Smell to Your Scenes
Your reader should not feel like an observer watching through a window. Readers want an escape. Let them into your world. Let them hear the floorboards creak, feel the scratchy sweater, taste the burnt coffee, see the carved initials in the beam, and smell the rain-soaked dog by the door. Using all five senses makes your scenes feel fuller, richer, and more real.
Scents deserve a special sniff, though, because smells have a uniquely strong tie to memory and emotion. Neuroscience has found that smell-evoked memories carry more emotional charge than those triggered by sight or sound. When revising, try adding a scent to each scene.
If you’re struggling to add sensory detail, that could be a sign your setting needs more development.
Do a Delightfully Dramatic Reading
Read your scene out loud like you are performing it for an audience. Use big emotion, dramatic gestures, and a fun accent.
Your ears can often hear things your eyes have trouble seeing. When you perform the scene out loud, you hear awkward sentences, flat dialogue, missing emotion, and repetition that you might miss when reading silently.
This can be especially helpful for action scenes where the writing has to be easy to follow and exciting to experience. Reading out loud will help you hear whether the pacing is too slow, too rushed, or just too confusing. It also reveals whether the sentence rhythm matches the moment.
Acting it out can also reveal continuity errors. For example, if your character is holding a cup of tea—do they ever set it down?
Plant “Potato” in Place of Your Character’s Name
You know your character’s backstory, the wound, the intention, and the emotion behind every line. But your readers only have the words on the page.
Temporarily changing your character’s name to something potentially wacky like “Potato” creates distance. It allows you to look at the writing more objectively and see the character on the page as opposed to the ideas you have in our head.
A variation on this is to replace every character’s name with something like: Potato1, Potato2, Potato3, or Red, Blue, and Green. Then read your scene and change each individual name back.
As you read, you may notice there are spots where a character, usually a minor one, says something, but you can’t remember who “Potato7” is supposed to be. Writers assume readers will remember all of the characters’ names, but readers need more than a label. A character becomes memorable through behavior, voice, role, appearance, or other specific details. If you cannot tell who a character is once the name is removed, the reader will also struggle.
Revising does not have to be a grim march through grammar and gloom. Sometimes the best way to whip your writing into winning form is to make the process a little weird. Change the font. Read backward. Sniff out sensory details. Perform your scene like you deserve a standing ovation. Turn your beloved main character into a potato. These tricks may seem silly, but it gives your brain a new way to see the story.