Before You Revise a Sentence, Revise the Book
and why you should yell at your manuscript sometimes
This post is adapted from my self-paced course, Revising the Novel.
Lately, I’ve been trying to wrangle a 98,000-word novel into something more manageable. When I start a revision, I tend to start the same way: reading and revising the first few chapters again and again, tweaking sentences, changing words, moving paragraphs. After a few weeks of this, I’m exhausted by the revision and decide to set the manuscript aside for a couple of days. A couple of days turns into a couple of weeks, a couple of weeks turns into a month…you know where this is going.
When you start revising, it's easy to get lost in the weeds. You open your file to page one and think, "Well, I can't start the book with this sentence. This sentence is boring/clunky/convoluted/unclear."
And, because everybody knows you shouldn't start a novel with a bad sentence, you rework the sentence until you get it just right. Then it occurs to you the second sentence isn't quite right either. The first page is the most important--you know you read that somewhere—so you spend a few days getting the first page just right.
But, of course, it's not just the first page that's crucial; it's the first chapter. So you spend a few more days getting the first chapter just right—sentence by sentence, word by word.
Now, it is true that the first sentence needs to be really good. It is also true that the first page needs to be compelling, and the first chapter needs to keep the reader fully engaged. It is true that the first five pages are so crucial to making a good impression—on literary agents, publishers, and your eventual reader—that a well-known literary agent once wrote a book titled The First Five Pages.
But while all of these things are true, it is also true that if you obsess over every word of chapter one at the beginning of your revision process, the revision is going to take much longer than it needs to.
Repeat after me: there will be time to fuss over every word later. Before you fuss over the sentences, you need to fuss over the book as a whole. Trust me on this.
I have never written a novel that didn't lose many pages on the editing room floor. Often, those pages had been revised repeatedly. Often, I had labored over every word. Which would be fine if the pages actually made it into the finished book. But, as I discovered farther into my writing career than I want to admit, it would have been much more efficient to revise the book itself before I picked over every sentence.
Of course, it is difficult for any writer to resist the temptation to make this sentence just right. And the next sentence. And the next. But when you first begin to revise, I encourage you to spend less time on the sentences than you want to.
Before you edit a single word, I want you to sit down with the manuscript—the hard copy manuscript, preferably—and read the entire thing through. Do this on a day when you have a few hours to set aside to do nothing else. Read with a pen in hand, definitely. But instead of correcting sentences, read for speed and flow. Read to get a general sense of the story, without thinking about whether or not you could have chosen a better word here, a clearer sentence construction there. There will be time for that later. (And when it is time to revise sentences: read First You Write a Sentence, by Joe Moran
Put your book to the grilled cheese test
On your first read, read in much the same way you would if you were reading a book for pleasure. Does the book make sense? Are the characters interesting? Do the characters do stuff? Is it clear why they do the things they do? Are the characters—especially your protagonist—active enough to be interesting? And, this is important: are there places where the pacing is sluggish and you are tempted to skim? At what point do you want to put the book down and go make a grilled cheese sandwich?
Speaking of grilled cheese: I had a friend in high school, a terrific writer and all-around sunny person who was later my college roommate at the University of Alabama, who used the term “grilled cheese” the way the rest of us, in those days, used the word “awesome.” If something was totally great, she would exclaim, “That’s grilled cheese!” Because grilled cheese sandwiches are, of course, wonderful, objectively speaking.
But if a grilled cheese sandwich (or a Netflix true crime documentary, or a tidytok video, or a pile of laundry) can lure you away from the novel, maybe the novel in that moment has gotten a little sluggish. Don’t try to fix it on the first read, but mark it. When I come across a section like this in my manuscript, I draw big line down the side of the page and write, “SLOW” in giant letters. If the novel is slow for ten pages, I’ll write SLOW on every page. This is me yelling at myself to pay close attention and fix it before I start fiddling with sentences. Yes, yes, we must be gentle with ourselves when we write, we must banish the editor/censor on our shoulder during the drafting phase, but there comes a time in every manuscript when you might need to yell at yourself, when you need to read your book the way you would read a stranger’s book.
Talk to your manuscript the way you would talk back at a movie
My husband has an impression he does of me watching movies at home. The impression goes something like this: “But why did she do that? But WHY are they doing that? Okay but that makes no sense. Seriously, WHO would do that. Nobody says that. Like did nobody read this script and say WTF? But why didn’t he let the kids out of the car before he went on the high-speed chase through the streets of the unnamed European city? Why didn’t they just tell us the name of the city? Okay but nobody wears stilettos in their own house after work, why didn’t she put on sweatpants?”
When you read your manuscript for revision, feel free to talk to it as if you are talking to the television (not that you talk to the television). It will help you get past feeling tender and protective toward your book, so you can think more objectively about what works and what doesn’t. There is a time to nurture your book (the drafting phase), and there is a time to wrestle with your book (the revision phase). Don’t be afraid of the latter.
That’s all for now. In the comments, I’d love to know what revision strategies work for you.
Are you ready to revise your novel or memoir? You might enjoy my self-paced course, Revising the Novel.
Thank you for reading The Caffeinated Writer. If you enjoyed this post, you might also enjoy my books. You will find them here.
