tackling revisions (craft post)

Current work: revisions on French Book 2
Listening to: Bach
Reading: next on TBR

I haven’t done a craft post for a while; and as I know people worry about revisions, I thought it might be useful to share how I do it. Not prescriptive: it's just how it works for me, as a confirmed planner. If you find it useful, great; if you find it scary or mad, ignore it.

Some people print out their manuscript and edit by hand, but I do mine completely on screen. I should admit that there’s a fair bit of what looks like messing about involved, but that’s actually thinking time and it's very useful.

Usually I get an email from my ed with a Word document attached, telling me what she likes and what doesn’t work. And then I go through what's turned out over the years to be a 12-step process:

1. Read ed’s/agent’s thoughts, decide what I agree with and what I will argue (latter usually means the idea is good but I haven’t made it clear enough for my reader to get it, first time round - have forgotten that readers cannot know what is in my head and not on the page), then sleep on it
2. Write self note about how I will restructure it (broad brush strokes) and email it to ed
3. More thinking about it, while ed also thinks about it (this step is usually accompanied by endless games of Spider Solitaire or Sudoku. Really, this is not just playing. I am keeping part of my brain and my hands busy while a different part of my brain is fixing the book. I might even do things like scrub tile grouting or clean the oven, in this phase…)
4. Hear back from ed – usually by this point we’ve come round to each other’s point of view and sorted a compromise
5. Copy file and paste to “draft 2” folder (each book has its own folder, with sub-folders of notes, pictures, draft 1, draft 2 etc – and my ed might get what she thinks is draft 1 but is actually draft 4, if previous chapters didn’t work. I never delete a file because it might come in useful in the future)
6. Open new file and set up a table. Left hand side is brief outline of book, chapter by chapter, as it is now (and that might not be the same as my original outline – although I’m a planner, I’m flexible with it). Right hand side is what I’m going to add/move/change. The level of detail varies here and sometimes includes whole conversations in note form (i.e. no punctuation, speech tags or anything, is all done in dashes as if it's a script); it really depends what the changes are.
7. Open copy of book, go through chapter by chapter and paste in notes from right hand side of table in appropriate place, highlighted so I can see what I’m doing
8. Switch on track changes, and do all the deletions (but leave them showing, just in case I change my mind about some of it)
9. Work through from start to finish, taking into account notes. Highlight all new text as I go in garish yellow.
10. Read through, checking for continuity and sense; tweak as necessary
11. Make broad-brush notes of what I’ve changed, according to garish yellow bits, then save garish file as ‘colour coded’ file and take off the highlight in the original file
12. Send revisions (non-highlighted!) to ed with a copy of the broad-brush notes; then keep fingers firmly crossed until ed says yes...