New writers:
It’s easy to think that you bring nothing to the table when it comes to revising your own work.
After all, you’re not an experienced, professional editor of any kind. You’ll never have the same level of objectivity as someone besides yourself. You’re too close to your work to see it clearly. So what could you possibly do to make your own work better?
Going through the self-revision process (the way I recommend, anyhow) allows you to move your piece closer to the direction you envisioned when you first wrote it. It gives you an opportunity to clarify and refine your ideas so that those concepts are easier to read on the page.
Think about it like moving your own wrapped-up furniture into the major areas of your new house. Before your interior designer comes to finesse the layout of each individual room, you can put specific pieces in place ahead of their arrival.
You put the couches, coffee table, and armchairs in / near where you want the living room to go. You put kettle bells, jump ropes, and medicine balls near the doorway of what will become your home gym. You place bed frames, mattresses, dressers, and nightstands where you want bedrooms to go.
You’re not an interior designer by any means, and you still want to leave that process up to a professional. But doing your own prep work for the house can give them a better idea of where you want certain rooms to go. This means they can serve you better and spend less time on these kinds of preliminary things that you can do yourself.
If you had simply piled all the furniture in a jumble in your foyer, the designer would have had to tour the house, make determinations about where they wanted certain rooms to go, then moved (or hired others to move) the furniture to the appropriate spaces. And all this would have had to be done before they could get started on actually applying their skills to each area. If you’re paying by the hour, the more time they spend there, the more money out of your pocket. Organizing the furniture and equipment helps them help you.
The process with editors works similarly. It’s a wonderful feeling to just get your fabulous ideas out on the page. But handing that jumble to an editor means you risk spending more money and time in edits than is necessary. By doing what you can on your own before you hand things off to your pro, you can cut some of the time and cost.
A client once came to me with a piece they had done zero self-revisions on. It ended up costing them more than $6,000 for me to engage in developmental edits for a piece that was a bit over 150,000 words long. The sad part was, most of the cuts I made were simply instances of verbatim repetition. It was painfully obvious, almost as though they had copied and pasted certain paragraphs in different places, even though they didn’t fit in those other areas. So, if they had done at least one full round of self-revisions, they could have handed me a piece that was already pared down to about 15,000 words (what I was able to cut it to without losing a bit of clarity or impact). A manuscript that small would have cost them closer to $600 instead of $6,000. One basic step would have saved them about $5,400.
The next time you think you can’t benefit your project by doing self-revisions, remember this story!
All that being said, you might be wondering how self-revisions are done. As with all artists, everyone has their own methods for doing things, including self-revisions. If you already have a strategy that is helping you produce work that your fans love, stick with it! If you’re just starting out or have never heard of self-revisions, I can provide one option for you.
My recommendation is a three-step process:
- Take a break from the manuscript of 7 to 30 days.
- Review the manuscript from start to finish, making notes on what you want to change along the way (“rewrite from Mrs. Zaka’s POV,” “insert flashback about oil spill,” “remove all mentions of Kennel Draper,” etc.). But you’re NOT actually making any adjustments at this point. Just reading and marking up.
- Revise the manuscript by moving from one note to the next and applying the instructions you gave yourself in each note. Don’t slow down to read since you just did that in the last step.
Doing this once can be a great help, but two or three times is even better. It’s just part of being an indie author. If you struggle with conditions like dyslexia, or if you are writing in a secondary language, you may be skeptical about the idea of trying to improve anything in your own work, even after understanding the benefits of doing self-revisions. I still encourage you to try. After all, you completed the manuscript! This means that you transformed a blank document into a finished (however unpolished) piece of literature. And if you can do that, I have faith that you can do at least one round of self-revisions in order to make that manuscript even stronger.
Happy revising!
Learn More
Check out the lesson on self-revisions.
Purchase Self-Revision Fundamentals.
