Writing Revisions: Plot Holes and Snarls
One of the greatest challenges with writing The Gods Chronicle series is the number of perspective characters and plotlines. Keeping everything straight can be complicated, which is why I have a massive ‘book bible’ with all of my notes. Unfortunately, sometimes things slip through the cracks. Sometimes they become small plot holes that can be easily fixed with a couple paragraphs of new work. Sometimes, they become full-blown tangled snarls and require a great deal more work to fixed. The hole I found in The Pantheon Prophet was at first small, and then with further thorough contemplation turned into a massive snarl that thoroughly messed with the continuity and timeline of my novel —which is an awesome opportunity.
First drafts suck. It’s the draft where your characters get to do what they want, plots are indulged, and you do whatever you want to creatively. That doesn’t make for a good story, but it gets everything out on the table. Once that’s complete and out of the way, it’s time for the revising stage—not the editing.
Revision: Leave Grammar out of it
Don’t worry about fixing your grammar when you’re revising. There isn’t much point in investing time and energy to pages and paragraphs that might get summarily cut. Using my example from above, I could have wasted a lot of time editing the chapters that ended up being cut for plot purposes. Thankfully, I didn’t. The revising part is for far more painful things than punctuation: Killing Your Darlings.
Now killing your darlings doesn’t just mean killing characters. It might be scenes, plots, dialogue, anything that gets in the way of telling a solid narrative. But don’t despair! And whatever you do, don’t just throw away your darlings. There are many times that a scene could be recycled or reused for a different book, or repurposed within another edit. If you use the snapshot/rollback feature in Scrivener, or keep a book bible where you can place cut scenes, I highly recommend it. That way you never have to regret cutting something.
Part of killing your darlings means doing what is necessary to serve the story, and that means looking at your story now from the reader’s perspective. There are some awesome things we as writers enjoy (like experimenting with different narrative devices, perspectives, etc.) but are cumbersome to the reader. We’ve all read something that felt like the author was enjoying their intellectual masturbation just a little too much—try to catch those moments before you put your readers through them.
Revise every step of the way
Revising isn’t a one-and-done step. It should be done after each draft, each edit, to make sure that your story is still the story you wish to tell. You should have numerous drafts for your manuscript, and at each step along the way, you should do a revision read. The revision step should be where you find your biggest plot snarls and fix them. Once you feel that you have a draft that you can’t make any better no matter how much you personally poke at it, then it’s time for the editing stage.
Editing: Development, Line, Copy, Oh my!
Every author goes about this process a little differently, but every manuscript needs to go through these processes.
Developmental edits are similar to revision stages. If revising isn’t your strong suit, or if you have a major problem that you can’t solve, a developmental edit is a must. Many editors offer this service, as do some beta readers. Revising is one of my strong suits (after a decade of working on it), so I personally don’t hire an editor for this stage. That said, I do make sure that the editor I hire for the next stages can also do developmental edits. I prefer an editor that is mindful of the big picture, not just the trenches.
These are the trenches. Grammar, voice, and flow are done here and you need an editor for this stage. You need a different set of eyes, as it’s far too easy for your own eyes to slide over a sentence and miss a typo. Especially when you already know what the sentence is supposed to look like, or what you meant to say. These are the edits that aren’t worth doing until revisions and developmental edits have been done. They take more time and are more detailed than the previous versions. Don’t waste your time or money on pages that revising will scrap.
The Last Edit. The edit that needs to come after the line edit, as it is the in-depth pre-proof read and reread that should smooth out everything. The copy edit is another one that you must hire an editor to do. None of the edits should be exclusively done by you for the same reasons as above, but also for one more very important reason: emotional stakes. Your editor will be more emotionally distant from the project, which can offer a great deal of clarity to the story.
Proofreading is your last pass. There shouldn’t be any more major revisions, edits, or changes after this point—if there are, then this isn’t proofreading, it’s copy editing.
Now, I’m off to go kill some darlings.
Author of The Dying Sun, Book 1 of The Gods Chronicle.
Pedantic Scribe of the ‘Scribe’s Journey Podcast’
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