Revision & Getting Feedback

Once your rough draft is done, let it rest for a while. Celebrate this milestone and take a few days to thank your loved ones for the time to write it. Then, it is time to start revisions. To do a complete set of revisions, you will need feedback.

Your first revision will be to go through the manuscript (MS) yourself to catch the obvious and glaring errors. I recommend you edit on paper. You will catch more errors than you would if you edited on the screen. If you find weak areas, grammar mistakes, and continuity problems, fix them now.

1. If a character is Grandma Ethel in the first chapter, she needs to stay Grandma Ethel throughout the book, not change to Grandma Esther in chapter seven.
2. Likewise, character hair and eye color, names (yes it happens), and backstory need to be consistent.
3. Weak areas of plot need to come out. Indeed, any sentence or paragraph that does not advance the story needs to be cut. it isn’t always easy, but the cutting must happen, hence the advice to “kill your darlings.”
4. Watch for adjectives and remove them whenever possible.
5. If you are uncertain about grammar, get Shrunk & White’s The Elements of Style or any recent grammar handbook.
6. Spell check is not reliable. Edit yourself for spelling errors, homonyms, etc.

Once you think your draft is free of most errors, find a few people willing to read it for you and provide feedback. There are forums writers’ groups you can join, Critters, local writers’ groups in your area, trusted friends, and sometimes family members that you can prevail upon to provide this function. I don’t recommend asking anyone who might be hurt or insulted if you don’t take their advice. It might not be wise to enlist coworkers, either, in case they are not as trustworthy as you thought. Also, be careful of some of the online groups that like to tear each others’ work apart. Find a safe and encouraging place to share your novel.

You need to develop a thick skin if you haven’t already. You are opening your baby up to be taken apart. You need to keep the mindset that you can learn from the critique process and that you can make your story better with the feedback you get.

What you want to discover from your “beta readers” is:

1. How does the story feels overall.
2. Are there places they got lost or places they felt you gave too much extraneous detail?
3. Did you keep the story moving along or did it bog down and become boring?
4. Are your characters engaging and interesting?
5. Do your characters ever act out of character?
6. Is the conclusion satisfying? Predictable? Blindsiding?
7. Are there ways you can improve the story?
8. Was there enough tension in the plot?
9. What questions came up during and after reading the MS?

Don’t be afraid to ask direct questions of your beta readers, and don’t forget to thank them for their time.

Once you have the results, read them over. Are there similar comments? Good suggestions? Commonly noted weaknesses? Sit down and look at your piece again. Think about how you can incorporate the good suggestions and correct the weaknesses. Revise your fiction accordingly.

This draft can be sent out again to another set of readers, or you can put it on the shelf for a month or two, then read it again yourself. When you get that feeling inside that says “finished,” stop working on it.

Now that you have finished a novel, what’s next? Check the articles next week for information on publishing.

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