Getting stuck on a developmental revision of your manuscript is a very common problem. It doesn’t help to see other authors posting about how much they love editing and revision.
When many of my authors sit down to revise, they look at their draft and pages full of comments and a report full of recommendations—and they freeze.
Or, they start to make changes in this or that sentence and forget what they were trying to say there or how it fits with the larger context. They feel like they deleted important sentences—or they can’t bring themselves to delete sentences lest they change their minds later.
Or they cut and change so much that they can’t make sense of what they have anymore.
One way or another, they get stuck and don’t know how to continue. The MS just sits there, and the project lags.
Emotionally, this is a big drain. You can feel ashamed, inferior, inadequate. It’s dispiriting, because you felt so great about completing the draft, but now you find there’s so much more to do. You just got used to feeling like you were competent enough to write a book, and now you’re back to square one, feeling like you’re in way over your head.
Look, revision is possible. People do it every day. You were probably doing it as you wrote the first draft. Like any writing skill, you can learn how to do it and eventually grow more comfortable with it.
The Developmental Revision
Let’s make sure we’re talking about the same thing. When I say “developmental revision,” I mean the work you do after you’ve hired a developmental editor to look at your work. That means you have completed a first draft and hopefully a second and possibly a third. Then a professional editor read it through, made some marginal comments in the document, and sent you a report with recommendations. (I call my report the Developmental Blueprint.)
Developmental is the most challenging revision stage because you already put so much work into the book. You want to be done with it, but chances are your editor had a lot of recommendations. Some of them probably require more than changing a sentence or two.
There are several very understandable conditions that lead to revision inhibition, but most of them rest on some misunderstanding about the writing process.
Discouragement
Receiving that Developmental Blueprint can be discouraging. You hoped you were nearly done, and here you are with a pile of more work to do. It’s also easy to convince yourself that your editor hates your book and they’re right. (I have advice for this at the line edit stage that also applies here.)
But take heart! You hired an editor to give you honest, expert feedback on your book. If they’re worth their salt, they gave you advice they thought would best help the manuscript. A good editor will be polite and compassionate but will not try to stroke your ego to convince you that you’re great and your book only needed a couple more commas.
The Precious Fallacy
You know the MS so well because you’ve spent so much time with it, and you know what it took to get it into the shape it is in. Getting rid of anything feels painful because it took so much work to get everything on the page in the first place. It all feels precious.
This is one of the most impactful mistakes a writer can make because it is so debilitating. If everything you write is solid gold, you would already be a famous author. Except most famous authors don’t believe everything they write is solid gold.
There’s a reason we have the saying, “Kill your darlings,” and that’s because every writer has to learn to edit text that feels important to them. That doesn’t mean your hard work was for nothing; it just means you’re a normal writer.
The Integrity Fallacy
The form the MS is in is the only form it has ever been in and the only form you have ever known it in. Changing anything feels like destroying the integrity of the whole. You put in everything you can think it needs, so you can’t imagine taking anything out.
You can see how this is a variant of the Precious Fallacy, only it’s disguised as something more intellectual, less emotional. It makes a similar error, however, in that it presumes that changing a manuscript can only make it worse, and that is simply not true.
If your editor has made a list of recommendations, that’s a sign that you can make changes without ruining the whole thing.
Not Knowing Where to Start
This is a more technical problem where you literally can’t decide where exactly to start. Should you start at the top of the MS and work through one change at a time? Should you start with the changes that make the most sense to you or seem easiest? There are so many recommendations on the Blueprint, where do you start?
This obstacle can result from a confusion about different levels of editing. Some comments require you to address punctuation or phrasing or even the clarity of a paragraph. I call those local edits because they can be addressed in specific locales in the MS.
Other comments require you to rethink some characteristic feature of the whole MS or a part of the whole. I call these global edits because you really have to read through the whole MS to make all the changes.
Discuss with your editor what global edits your MS requires and attend to those first. You may make a change that makes a local edit irrelevant or obsolete. But also remember what the editor said about the local edits, because that may help you avoid repeating that error in another place. The rule that governs a local edit still applies globally.
Getting Lost in the Weeds
This happens when you try to revise a paragraph or section and keep getting stuck on this or that sentence, endlessly trying to rewrite it to fit the rest of the paragraph. Your editor’s comment almost certainly expected you to think holistically about the problem, but you’re treating it as a syntax or diction issue.
You need to back up and ask what this paragraph or section needs to accomplish. Then you need to be free to rewrite it entirely rather than try to use as many of the original sentences as you can.
How to Revise Well
While false beliefs can inhibit us mentally from revising, what really bogs us down is poor revision tactics. Authors try to go in and make local changes to a MS that has global issues. Or they begin tearing a paragraph apart and don’t know how to put it back together.
Typically, if you’re working on a developmental revision with a Developmental Blueprint in hand, your best strategy will go something like this:
- Assess and delineate the global edits
Create an actual bullet-point or numbered list of the global edits you need to make. That includes style, grammar, usage, and other matters that may have merited a local comment but would apply generally.
- Collate notes for each chapter
Referring both to the Developmental Blueprint and to your editor’s marginal comments, make notes on what you need to do for each chapter in your own words.
This does two things. One, it collects everything you need to know in one place so you don’t need to remember where some note was.
Two, it forces you to think about your editor’s recommendations in terms you understand. When you get back into the weeds, you won’t have your editor there holding your hand or explaining what they meant. Make sure you know prior to starting the revision.
- Have a Follow-Up Meeting with Your Editor
I always include a follow-up meeting with a developmental edit because I know there will be questions and I want to make sure you are sent off with as much confidence about what you need to do as possible.
I also tell my authors to give themselves at least 24 hours between reading the Developmental Blueprint and having our follow-up. The Blueprint can be overwhelming, and getting criticism can be emotional, so it’s good to give yourself time to process and reflect.
Then, if you start to collect and collate your notes, you will start to see what questions you have, where you may disagree with your editor, and where you may have additional ideas. That will make the follow-up meeting more fruitful for everyone.
- Open a new, blank document
This is my favorite tip and it is crucial! The best way to overcome the Precious and Integrity Fallacies is to avoid messing with the original draft altogether. Instead, open a blank document side-by-side with your existing draft.
For each chapter, consult your notes and think about what that chapter needs to accomplish and what you need to do differently. Then, start writing.
Now, you might decide you like a lot of what you originally wrote. That’s okay, but I still want you to retype it. You’ll find that you’ll still make minor changes as you go because you’ll “hear” the sentence in your head.
If you can’t hear a sentence in your head, say it out loud and see how it plays.
Consult your global edits every time you start a new chapter (you’ll be consulting your chapter notes, anyway). You’ll also be able to address local comments made by your editor as you go. Again, many of them will not be relevant if you rewrite the whole thing with the global edits in mind.
Nothing is Lost
The magic of the blank document is that it frees up your brain to make as many changes as you need to without the fear that you’re harming your original draft or losing anything you have already written. That draft will always be there, as it was, with all its hard-wrought imperfections. You’re making something new.
If you’re anything like me, you’ll find that you don’t retain a whole lot of the original. You’ll cover the same ground and say many of the same things, but you’ll say most of them in slightly different, often clearer or more precise ways.
The truth is, nothing is ever lost in writing. Writers throw away words all the time. It’s part of the process. The work you did writing the first draft prepared you to write the stronger second draft, and so on.
So don’t sweat leaving words behind. There’s more where those came from.
If you need help with a developmental edit or developmental revision, I’m your guy. Reach out!
Feature Image by Carlos Magno on Unsplash
