Episode Nineteen: Four Reasons Revising Your Novel Feels Overwhelming
This week, I’m talking about my favorite topic: revision!
Revision a novel is a lot like climbing a mountain. It’s difficult, requires planning, and not everyone who starts out will reach the end. I don’t want your novel to end up in the back of a drawer or some dusty corner of your hard drive, so let’s talk about why revision is so overwhelming and how you can make the revision process work for you.
Here are four reasons revision is overwhelming:
You haven’t trained before starting your climb (you don’t yet have the skills to revise)
You haven’t mapped out the right route (you don’t have a clear revision strategy)
You’re trying to climb alone (you don’t have emotional support or critical support)
You don’t know what the peak looks like (you don’t have a clear vision for your finished book)
Here are the resources and tools mentioned in this episode:
Need help figuring out what your peak looks like? Grab my FREE Revision Kickstart Guide and set a vision that will guide your revisions! You can download it here: https://olivia-helps-writers.kit.com/revision-kickstart-guide
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Have a response to this episode? Hit me up on Instagram @oliviahelpswriters https://instagram.com/oliviahelpswriters
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Thanks for listening, keep writing, and keep getting better one word at a time!
Transcript
Olivia Bedford (00:00)
Revising a novel is a lot like climbing Everest.
Both are big tasks, tasks that feel impossible to most people. And these are also tasks that require strategic planning, training, and a lot of hard work. And the reality is that not everyone is going to make it to the end of those journeys. Thankfully for us writers, the stakes are not life or death. We will all make it alive to the other side. But your novel could end up in a drawer or buried in the quarry trenches if you didn't revise successfully. And that's what I want to help you avoid.
Welcome to episode 19 of the Better Writer podcast. Today, I want to talk about why revision is overwhelming. And I mean this in both the logistical sense, the emotional sense, the mindset sense. And I just want to talk about a few reasons why I think people get stuck revising. And first, I want to reframe the process for you. And I think for a lot of people, we think that writing the novel is the hardest part.
Creating that first draft is the hardest part and creating a draft is super hard. But I would argue that for a lot of people, revision is actually harder. And if it feels super easy, you're probably not doing it right. Caveat, if you are a big plotter who has written books before, then you might have that whole process down pat and your revisions are very simple. But I tend to work with pantsers I work with newer authors and beginners, and for all of those groups, most likely your revisions are difficult. And if they're not difficult, there might be something going wrong. And that doesn't mean that I want you to be completely overwhelmed by revision, but I do think that we need to talk about why revision is difficult and how you can take steps to make sure that it doesn't feel completely overwhelming so that you can revise successfully and get your book done. All right. I already alluded to this, but I'm going to keep using the metaphor of a mountain. And I think revising a novel is a lot like climbing a mountain for multiple reasons. Both are huge tasks. They are complicated tasks that require preparation and planning and strategy.
And unfortunately, not everyone makes it to the end of the journey, especially if you were on a dangerous mountain like Everest. And thankfully for us novelists, the stakes are not life and death. Not finishing your novel will not kill you. Having your novel get rejected will not kill you. Hopefully. Maybe a little piece of your soul will die, but you will keep living and breathing to try again. But that doesn't mean that your novel will get done. It could end up in the back of a drawer or some dusty corner of your hard drive, or it could end up going out into the querying trenches before you're truly ready and get buried. And there are many, many reasons to get rejected. is not all because your novel wasn't, ⁓ you know, successfully revised, but there are novels that get rejected because they were not successfully revised. And that is what I want to talk about today. So.
When we think about climbing a mountain, it looks impossible to get to the top, but it is possible as long as you're approaching it in the right way. And I think when people get totally overwhelmed, when they get lost in the weeds of revision, it's usually because they didn't take the right approach. So there are four main issues that I see in the way people are approaching revisions that lead to overwhelm and giving up and burning out. The first is that people are not packing the right gear or training the right way for their hike up Revision Mountain. And there is some training and practice and skill that is involved in just getting that draft done. Of course, you will have learned so much just by writing and finishing your draft. And honestly, in this metaphor, your first draft could be base camp. Getting to Everest base camp is no joke. It takes training and preparation and a lot of hard work just to hike to that point. But we still have to climb the mountain afterwards. And if you are not continuing to develop your skill as a writer, if you didn't take any writing classes as you drafted and you just kind of made it up as you went along based on vibes and what you know about reading books, you likely have learning to do. There are skills that you don't yet have that will need to be practiced before you will be able to successfully revise your novel. And that can be hard to hear especially if you are someone who was a straight A, you know, English student or something like that. But the skills of fiction are different. And if you have never studied the craft of writing fiction, you need to do some of that work before you try to revise. Otherwise, you are going to keep replicating problems. You are going to miss problems and you're not going to be able to fix your draft the way that you want to. So we do need to train. We need to learn the skills of fiction. And that can look like a lot of different things that can look like accessing free resources. It can look like taking classes. It could look like reading craft books. It could be working with a coach. There are so many options out there that you can find the one that works for you or the ones that work for you. You don't have to limit yourself to just one of those pathways. But make sure if you are completely overwhelmed by revision and you don't even know where to start, it might be that there is a skill gap that you need to address first. And if you want to hear more about why what you learned in high school English classes isn't enough,
Go back to episode two of this podcast where I talk all about the ways that general education or writing for work or business or whatever it is doesn't actually prepare us to write fiction and in some ways can actually make it harder for us to write fiction when we try to do that as adults.
Alright, the second reason why revision feels so overwhelming is because you haven't mapped out your route. You don't have a plan for getting up the mountain. You can imagine that if someone decided they were going to climb Everest and just decided to wing it, things would not go well for them. There are crevasses you can fall into and cliffs you can go over. And I there are actually also like different specified routes up Everest and people kind of pick and choose which one is going to be better for them.
I don't actually know anything about climbing Everest, but we're going to pretend. But it's kind of like if you go on a simpler hike, there might be a trail. And if you just decide to wing it from the parking lot and you don't even know where the trail is, that is going to be a problem. Take it from me. If you've ever hiked in Connecticut, I lived there for about eight years. Their trails are some of the worst marked in the world. I have gotten lost on many a Connecticut hiking trail. Just going through the woods by accident is not fun. That's not where we want to be. We want the map, the route, the trail.
And that is also true when you are revising a novel. And I see too many people who just decided to start rereading their novel on page one, and they're sort of making things up as they go along, deciding that, ⁓ this character in chapter one needs a small minute change, and we keep making these little changes to each chapter or section, thinking about each of them individually, and never stopping to think, does this whole make sense? And
If you have never stopped to consider, does chapter one work with chapter two versus just are chapter one and chapter two working independently, you might have a collection of individual chapters that make sense or work or even beautiful to read, but you won't end up with a cohesive novel. And that is where a lot of writers fall short. They have just thought about each chapter, each scene, they're just going page by page and...
If you just start on page one and start reading, you're also very likely to end up editing instead of revising. And they are different. Editing is that sentence level stuff, cleaning up typos, word choice, making your descriptions pretty. All of those things are essential. They just need to happen at the end of your writing process, not the beginning. Revision has to happen first. And we want to revise strategically. To me, that means starting with a look at your novel holistically.
My favorite way to do that, especially for messier drafts or early drafts, is with a reverse outline. That is where you are basically summarizing the story that you've written. We're checking to see how the plot works as a whole. We are making revision decisions based on that outline. We're revising the outline first, and then we go forth and make those changes happen on the page. And yes, that is work upfront. However, I would argue that in a successful revision, 90 % of the work happens up front. I will say that again. In a successful revision, 90 % of the work should happen before you have rewritten a single word of your story. And the reason is, we need to make story level decisions, which means evaluating the whole story. A change that you were making to chapter 10 might also require a change in chapter one. Your change to the climax of the story might have its seeds in the inciting incident and we need to know all of those things upfront or else you are going to end up revising multiple times because you are going to have to go back and make those changes instead of just doing it once upfront. Of course, you could still end up changing your mind and rewriting there's not, you know, having to go back and re-revise things is not a bad thing. It does not mean you failed. But if we can lessen that, we can avoid having to go back and rewrite things is going to save us time. It's going to be more efficient and you are less likely to give up because I think a lot of people they get overwhelmed in revision when they finally make it to chapter 50 and realize that something is going wrong in chapter 50 and now they have to rewrite chapters 1 through 49 again. If that happens to you, it's going to be so hard to keep going back and some people will sustain the energy. Some people will do it.
But wouldn't it be nicer to reverse outline chapter 50, realize there's a problem, and then edit your summary of chapters 1 through 49 instead of having to rewrite the actual book multiple times? And that is what I teach in my courses. That is what I try to encourage people to do. Make the reverse outline, revise the reverse outline, ideally get feedback on the reverse outline, which is what happens in my course, and then go back and make those changes to your draft after working with that condensed simple version. Kind of like going through a simulation of your hike or mapping out your route before you have set foot on the mountain. So you know where you're going, you know what you need to do, you know where you might run into trouble all before you have even set foot on the mountain. That I think is what really makes a revision sustainable. It might not be easy. I'm not saying the revision is going to be a walk in the park.
You're still climbing Everest, but it's gonna be so much easier to actually make it to the top of the mountain if you know what you're doing step by step instead of just trying to wing it and figure it out day by day.
The third reason why revision is so overwhelming is because people are trying to climb revision mountain alone. And I think all of us know that people climb Everest in teams. There might be some world record holder out there who has climbed solo that might be a thing, I don't know. But most people who are successfully climbing Everest are going with guides, they went with teams, they have people who are carrying gear, they have medical support, I think that makes sense. But the point is, most people are not trying to climb mountains alone. People are often encouraged to hike with a buddy in case something happens to you. Things tend to go wrong when we are by ourselves and there is no one to call for help, no one to help you, no one to make sure that you don't go off the trail and get lost, things like that. And when you are writing or revising a novel, it is the same way. And you need support in multiple ways. I don't just mean paid feedback or anything like that. You need...writing friends to give you encouragement and support when you are trekking up the mountain and it feels hard and impossible. You need someone who's going to say, this is normal, this is natural, this is part of process. You need someone that you can bounce ideas off of when you are confused and unsure. You need someone who is just going to give you a smile or a hug when things are difficult and say, I believe in you and the story you're creating. And then you also need the people who are going to help you get your book ready for readers in a more logistical sense or in a more critical sense. You need feedback. I have said this before on the podcast, I will say it again, feedback is essential. You cannot create a novel that people are going to want to read if no one has ever read your drafts. Again, that doesn't mean hiring an editor necessarily. That can be beta readers, critique partners, it could be your spouse or partner or some, know, whoever you can get to read your story. You just need to make sure that you are getting feedback from someone.
The higher quality that feedback, the better, but you definitely need to have someone at some point read your story. You do not want the agent that you're querying or the first reader who buys your book to be the absolute first person to have read that draft because it is almost certain that even a bad beta reader or even a bad critique partner will find something that you missed and at least one thing that you missed. And that is essential.
Obviously we want high quality feedback so we can find more than just one thing that we missed, but it is essential. Do not try to climb a revision mountain alone. Find the people who are going to support you, who are going to cheer you on, and find the people who are going to say, your rope is busted. We need to take a break before we go any further and fix XYZ. So you need both sets of those people. They can have many different roles, coaches, editors, beta readers, critique partners et cetera. Find them, hold on to them and make sure you are not trying to do this alone because it will feel even more impossible than it would with a group. All right, and finally, the fourth reason why I think people get overwhelmed by revision and give up is because they don't even know what the peak looks like. In other words, they don't know what done is. They don't know where they're headed as a writer, as an author. They don't know what they need to actually do to successfully revise. And specifically, I think that often looks like not knowing what their vision for their book is. What is it that you're actually trying to create for readers? And that is going to be unique for every writer, for every genre, for every target audience. So there isn't one Everest for all of us. There isn't one peak that we are all aiming for. You need to figure out what that is for you. And I think that's why writing a novel is one of the things that makes it so difficult is because despite what some people will try to tell you, there is no one right way. There is no one set objective standard that applies to all books because different genres prioritize different things. Different readers prioritize different things. And it's your job to figure out who are you writing for? What do they want from you? How can you deliver? And if you don't know that going into your revision process, how are you making decisions?
And that might sound really blunt, but...How are you going to decide which revisions will make your book better if you don't know what that book is going to be? If you don't know what better is, there's no getting closer to it. So you need to step back and set a vision. Remember I said 90 % of a successful revision happens before you actually rewrite a single word. This is part of it. You need to figure out who are you writing for? What do they want from you? What does that actually specifically look like? And then from there, you know what you need to prioritize, you know what your peak looks like, you will know when you have reached the top of the mountain because you have clarity, you have a vision of what that looks like before you have even taken a single step. If you need help with that step in particular, I have a free guide, the Revision Kickstart Guide that will walk you through a five-step process for setting that vision, figuring out what your story needs. So I highly, highly recommend downloading it. Again, it's completely free, the Revision Kickstart Guide, and it will be linked wherever you are watching or listening to this show.
So you can figure out what does your personal Everest peak look like, where are you heading in revision, and what do you need to do to get there. And of course, if you want to go even deeper, my course, Reader Ready Revisions, takes you through this process step by step. Again, it's really designed to try to take as much of the overwhelm out of the revision process as possible. We go through the plan, the strategy, the vision, all of it in that course with feedback from me on your reverse outline, on your manuscript, on some of the other assignments that you do, which is going to be new in the next round. So the enrollment is not quite open, but I do have a wait list, which again, will be linked and you'll be the first to know when you can sign up. And I'm hoping to offer you some nice bonuses as well that I think will make it even more helpful and hopefully get you up revision mountain with even less overwhelm and less stress because that is my mission on this earth, is to help writers create amazing books and to hopefully make it easier for you, more sustainable for you, and maybe even a little bit more fun. All right, thank you so, so much for listening to another episode of the Better Writer podcast. If this episode helped you, if you had any insights or aha moments, please, please, please share with a friend, share it on social. I would love for this show to help as many writers as possible and you can help me do that. Alright, thank you again for listening. Have a wonderful week. Keep writing and keep getting better one word at a time. See ya!
