Copyedits Can Wait
Image by Kelly Sikkema
I’ve been thinking a lot about revision lately and what a beast it is, especially for full-length works. Even if you are a revise-as-you-go type, tweaking and deleting sentences or reshaping the narrative trajectory on the daily, at some point you'll have to step back and look at the whole with a critical eye. To attempt to fully see a full-length work like that is intimidating! You may wonder if it's even possible.
One big mistake that I made over and over across the years when revising my own work was to tackle copy edits first. There's something so satisfying about fiddling with sentences, rearranging them, swapping words, refining dialogue, smoothing out the errors. But you know what? All those perfect sentences don't matter if the story needs major structural work. Fixing the minutia first, before the whole of the story hangs together relatively well, is a huge waste of time. (No sense polishing words and sentences that may be hitting the cutting room floor.) And that is why I have a proverbial drawer full of stories that contain pretty sentences but which don't quite hang together as narratives.
I was basically painting the walls and loading in furniture before I'd finished building the foundation, you know?
So how should you tackle revision?
I really like using Author Accelerator’s Hierarchy of Editorial Concerns as a foundation for what to tackle first. Here are the questions to ask yourself—and answer with brutal honesty:
Does your novel have a point and a purpose?
Is the world of your story believable and logical?
Is there a cause-and-effect trajectory, aka narrative drive?
Does your protagonist have a clear desire and something standing in the way of that desire?
If you find any of these areas lacking, address those first before moving into the next layer of revision, which I'll get into in my newsletter this coming Sunday (October 29, 2023).
If you're thinking, "I can't possibly see whether my novel effectively handles these things--I'm too close to the material!", that's where a good editor (⬅️ this is a bookmark-worthy link!) or book coach 👋 can be invaluable. We're here to help!
