Dear Reader,
I am currently in the process of revising a manuscript in preparation for self-publication. Revision is a long process and can lead to burn out. It is tempting to say after your first run through the manuscript that it is good enough. Don't give into that temptation! Resist! For the love of your book, resist the temptation to say that your manuscript is done after one revision.
Maybe you can get away with that in a high school English class, if you're teacher is overworked and is just skimming through papers. Get outside of that special life of writing that is for secondary school and you can't just skate through with out 'extra' revision. There is this myth that authors, especially the big name ones, write the perfect book in one shot and editors just breeze through them to make sure that the layout looks good. It is a terrible lie. Don't believe it.
Revision is a skill. It does not come easily. Let us be honest, here, none of the skills in this trade come easily. Sitting down with a work and searching out its weaknesses and flaws is painful, boring, and tedious. That's why I will let a fresh manuscript sit for a few months before I pick it up again to start the revision process. And I don't try to bang my way through the process in one month. If the manuscript is really short, I may get lucky and one month is how long it takes. Most of my manuscripts, however, are not that short.
It takes me at least three months to get through a NaNoWriMo project (50k+ words) for my first round of revision. Then I set it down for a month to work on something else. After that, I pick it up for the second round of revision. The first round is checking to make sure that the major story elements work and that I have character details correct in most of the scenes. The second round is where I start looking at the mechanics of the book and things like grammar. It is the nightmarish part of revising and editing that I don't particularly enjoy. Still, going through the book with a fine toothed comb is the only way you can get it ready for the third round of revision. That final round of revision is where I try to get things like pagination and font spacing right. I am still looking to make sure I didn't miss anything in the previous rounds of revision.
After spending most of a year on the three revision phases, I will have a manuscript ready for me to consider publishing. I stick it in a proverbial drawer for another month, sometimes two. Then I read through it. If it still works and still tells the story I want to tell, I proceed with the process of self-publication. Sometime, however, after the functional year of revision, I have to scrap large parts of the manuscript and rework. That puts me back at square one after I have done that. I usually want to light my laptop on fire and throw it out a window when that happens. It's ok to cry and eat that pint of ice cream when that happens.
After those feelings pass, come back at the writing desk and see what you have sitting there. It just might be worth spending another year on revision. Or, you might be insanely lucky and have something that is just right. Still do that first round of revision, just to make sure, though.
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