How to Revise

Welcome to the turning point in this course on Prose! The previous chapters gave you the tools for putting the thoughts in your head into words. Now you have a first draft of whatever you’re writing. (For purposes of following along with this course, I’d recommend writing several very short stories.)

The sentences are probably clunky, though. Many of them could be shorter. Whole paragraphs exist with no reason, and you accidentally used the word “table” seven times in one paragraph, sounding like a broken record.

That’s fine. That’s what revision is for!

From now on, the chapters will give in-depth techniques and advice for improving your prose. For rewriting the original ideas into ones with more clarity and power behind them.

I’ll do so by going from the absolute smallest element of prose (which words to pick and punctuation) to the biggest elements (revising whole chapters and stories).

Methods of Revision

There is, unfortunately, no “holy grail of revision”. Speak to any (successful) writer and they’ll tell you their own, personal revision method that’s completely different from anything else.

Some writers like to do many drafts, each time focusing on one thing. So the second draft improves character A, the third draft improves character B, the fourth draft improves all the fighting scenes, and so forth. Those writers will tell you they do thirteen drafts for a book. That doesn’t mean they completely read and revise the whole book thirteen times—god no! It means they work like this.

Others like to work in layers. They do a second draft focusing on the biggest structural problems. (Story lines that don’t make sense, plot holes, removing a useless scene.) A third draft focuses on smaller issues with recurring characters, locations, themes. And a fourth draft might deal with tiny issues like the prose in certain bits.

I personally have a hybrid approach. As I write the first draft, I already keep notes for what I need to change in the second draft. If I see a huge issue, I take a day to revise what I already have before writing new material. This means I “technically” never do more than a second or third draft, because I already revise and collect notes while working on the first draft.

Additionally, if I really think a part of the story is trash, I will just completely rewrite thousands of words from scratch. This only works if you can type really quickly ;)

All of that is personal preference. But you might notice a recurring theme here.

Stories are too complicated to fix “everything” at once or improve “everything” at the same time. When revising, pick one thing to focus on at a time, and only worry about that for the time being.

The second recurring theme is …

Prose is easy to fix and tweak. Worry about bigger plot/character/story issues before worrying about making your sentences as beautiful as they can be.

About the upcoming chapters

As you read the next chapters, don’t try to memorize all the “rules”. When you do a second draft, don’t try to “keep all the rules in mind”. No, for every draft, pick the ones you want to practice with (or think are the most important to get right), and only check your prose for those.

As I said before: All writing is rewriting.

You will spend most of your time improving the mess that spilled from your creative brain. Every time you do, all these guidelines and ideas about “good prose” will become more intuitive and instinctual to you. Which leads to a cleaner and better first draft the next time you try.

At first, cutting into your older work feels horrible. The first 10 revisions I ever did? Yeah, I barely changed a word here and there, and only added more stuff. It felt stupid to destroy paragraphs and scenes for which I’d worked so hard!

As you write more, you get a better sense of what really needs to be there and what doesn’t. You know that you can cut that whole chapter, because you have the skill to write a new one in two hours. Don’t be afraid to make radical changes. Kill your darlings. The best writers I know have perfected the skill of revision and understand that sometimes you need to throw out half the book if that’s necessary to get a better end result.

That said, let’s get started with the tips and techniques to improve prose!