After you’ve completed your draft, you need to revise and edit it. We explain the difference between revision and editing and give some tips on using Scrivener’s features to help you polish your draft.
When you’ve completed the first draft of a manuscript, either fiction or non-fiction, the next stage of the writing process is to edit and revise the work. Each of these tasks focuses on the manuscript in different ways and requires a different approach. Here’s what you should know about revision and editing, and how Scrivener can help you polish your draft.
When should you start revising and editing?
When you’ve completed the first draft of a manuscript, it’s not the time to start revising and editing. You should put the manuscript aside for a few weeks, or even a few months, so it feels fresh when you come back to it. Everything will be familiar, of course, but you will be looking at the words from enough of a distance to be critical and to find the changes that need to be made. In addition, the book you’ve written will have been floating around in your subconscious for those weeks or months, and you will have developed ideas about what its final version should be.
What is revision?
Revision is when you look at the big-picture elements of your manuscript, such as the overall structure, content, themes, and flow of the writing. When revising, you may move chapters around, add or remove characters, delete scenes, and more. This is the time when you rethink all your decisions about plot, character, and setting.
When revising, you try to analyze your manuscript like a reader. Look for plot holes, unresolved plot threads, pacing issues, character arcs, cliffhangers, transitions, and all the other elements that contribute to the overall story. Ask yourself if everything makes sense, and if there are any speed bumps that could slow readers down. Be prepared to make major changes when you’ve found problems; revision is rarely simple.
Scrivener has a number of tools you can use when revising a book. Synopses in the Inspector let you write an overview of each scene or chapter; you can add notes to your files, to help you keep track of what you might want to change; and you can try moving scenes and chapters around in the Binder, Outline, or Corkboard. See How to Revise the First Draft of Your Novel in Scrivener for more on these features.
One key feature in Scrivener you should use when revising is snapshots. Scrivener snapshots are backups of individual files; chapters and scenes. You can take a snapshot, revise the text, and then, if you later think you might want to roll back some of your changes, you can compare your revised version to its snapshots and see if there’s anything you want to restore. See Use Snapshots in Scrivener to Save Versions of Your Projects to learn more about this feature.
Some writers like to retype their entire draft when revising their books. This may seem like a lot of work, but it can pay off by giving you a fresh look at every word you’ve written. Some writers retype after working out the big changes they’ve made, and some only retype their work when they’ve finished revision and reached the editing stage. Read Why You Might Want to Retype Your Draft when Revising.
If your manuscript is non-fiction, revision is necessary to ensure that your book stays focused on its main ideas, that each chapter is both self-contained and contributes to the overarching topic of the book, and to cut the fat. It’s easy, when writing non-fiction, to include lots of facts, examples, and arguments, but sometimes, if there are too many, readers can get lost.
What is editing?
Editing is when you look at small-scale changes, such as grammar, syntax, punctuation, and word choice. It is also the stage when you look closely at your dialog to make sure it sounds authentic.
When editing, you pay less attention to the story or topic of the book, and more attention to the details. It can be helpful to read your work out loud, as you’re likely to spot mistakes more easily than when reading on screen. It can also be helpful to print your manuscript and make edits on paper; this allows you to move away from the screen that you’ve been staring at for so long. Read Why You Should Print Your Manuscript and Edit It on Paper for more on this.
When editing dialog, you can Use Dialogue Focus and Linguistic Focus to Revise and Edit Your Writing in Scrivener. This features displays all your dialog in black, and dims or grays out the rest of the text so you can read dialog without all the additional text. This can help you focus more on how the dialog sounds, rather than getting lost with everything that surrounds it.
A great book to help you through the editing process is Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, by Renni Browne & Dave King; see These Five Books Will Make You a Better Writer for information about this and other books on writing.
When editing a non-fiction manuscript, you also do fact-checking. You need to verify every name, date, source, reference, and quote. You’ll already have established a list of references and bibliography, but this is the time to check that all of these citations are correct and up-to-date. If your book is being published by a traditional publisher, you’ll probably have a copy editor who will check these, but it’s best to provide the most accurate references you can.
Revision and editing are the keys to creating a book
Revision and editing are where a book is created. The first draft is where you toss down some clay on the wheel and start to form it. Revising and editing through multiple drafts builds that clay into a coherent vessel. Many writers love the revision and editing stages of writing because that’s where they can be the most creative, where they can hone and refine their work, and make it the best possible book.
Kirk McElhearn is a writer, podcaster, and photographer. He is the author of Take Control of Scrivener, and host of the podcast Write Now with Scrivener.