As some of you may know, NaNoWriMo’s “Now What?” months are in full swing. This means one thing: revision!

I tend to write one book in November, and revise a different book in the Now What months. As a person with many projects, this makes it easier to dedicate my time and attention to different works at different places in the writing process without getting them confused. It also allows me to leave a draft be for a bit and come back to it with fresh eyes.

This year for Now What, I’m working on my third draft of Usurper (working title). Last year for Now What and Camp NaNo, I rewrote this bad boy, creating draft two. It’s been about a year, and I’m picking it up again to really get it ready for querying later in the year.

I thought you might find it helpful to see my revision plan. Take what works for you and leave the rest!

Here’s how I go about looking at a draft for revision:

1. 1st Read-through: for this one, I do just that—read the book, get a feel for where it stands now, what I like and what I want to change. I take notes, but I try to keep edits in the actual text to a minimum at this point. (I keep a leatherbound journal for each WIP where I write down ideas, character sheets, and whatever else I might need.)

2. 2nd Read-through: here, I pinpoint problem areas in plot/pacing, and notate them directly in the draft. This process can be difficult, and take a long time to go through, which is why I start here. I like to get the hard things out of the way first, because if something big is changing, the little things I work on later might not matter at all.

– I plan revision for specific chapters or scenes, and plan out any missing scenes in my journal, or in the form of a post-it timeline on my bulletin board.

3. 3rd Read-through: check for small things to edit. Problem areas for me that don’t necessarily effect plot, but really matter when it comes to readability as a story:

– Setting description

– Dialogue

– Words ending in -ing or -ly

– Minor items in need of research

– Timeline/Dates

4. Rewrite. For me, the most effective method has been rewriting the whole book, scene-by-scene. I work in Scrivener, and separate my scenes in smaller, linked documents. (If you don’t use Scrivener, I highly recommend checking it out!) When I rewrite a scene, I make a duplicate of it so I have a version that’s not “messed up,” and then I have complete freedom to go through the duplicate and completely rewrite it paragraph by paragraph, or scrap it entirely.

And that’s about it, by the end of this messy process, I’ll have a new draft of my novel.

What do you do during revision? Are there any steps you simply can’t do without that aren’t mentioned here?

Thanks for reading!

– Ember