I’ve spent the last two episodes talking about writing challenges. If you’re thinking about Novel November or any of the other NaNoWriMo replacements out there, you’re probably excited to start writing the book. But what happens when you’re done and it’s time to revise that messy first draft?
I talk about revision a lot, and I definitely have suggestions for how to manage the revision process when you get there, but this episode isn’t about revision. It’s about setting yourself up for success while you’re still drafting.
In this episode, I’m sharing five things you can do while writing the draft to make your life easier in revision.
They are:
Write down revision ideas as they come to you during the drafting process.
Keep those future revision notes in a single, designated revision OR consolidate every week or so if you tend to take notes in multiple places.
Document all big decisions about your world or character backstories so you have the beginnings of a story/series bible when you’re done.
Reverse outline as you draft by summarizing each day’s new writing when you’re done.
Use TK/FCK or another marking system to designate missing information or decisions that you want to make later (e.g., character names, worldbuilding decisions, etc.).
Listen to the full episode for my explanation of each technique and how you can implement it in your writing process!
Happy novel writing!
P.S. Still looking for a new November writing challenge? You can check out a list of NaNoWriMo alternatives with links to sign up here. Just FYI, I am not affiliated with or sponsoring any of these challenges and haven't even decided if I'm joining one this year.
Thanks for listening, keep writing, and keep getting better one word at a time!
You can listen to this episode in your favorite podcast player here or watch on YouTube here.
Thanks for listening, keep writing, and keep getting better one word at a time!
Transcript
Please note, this is a lightly edited transcript and may have errors.
Olivia (00:08)
If you've ever fast drafted a novel, you know that what you end up with on the back end might feel like it is destined to live out the rest of its life collecting dust on your hard drive because there is no way you are ever going to let someone else see it. But as I talk about all the time, it is 100% possible for you to revise your messy draft, no matter where it is starting out. but I'm not going to talk about revision today. I'm going to talk about how to make your life a little bit easier by doing a few things differently in the fast drafting process. So over the last couple of weeks, I've been talking about writing challenges, specifically all of the writing challenges that have come out of the demise of NaNoWriMo. So there's Novel November by Pro WritingAid. There is, I'm completely blanking on all the others. I know 4 the Words has a challenge, Dabble has a 60 day writing challenge. Many writing challenges are out there that you can still participate in.
And basically they all encourage you to write a novel as quickly as you can. But what the heck do you do with that novel when it's done? how do you make sure that you are setting yourself up for success when it's time to revise so that it is not completely miserable? I cannot promise that you will have a pain free revision with that fast draft, but hopefully you can find at least one tip or trick in this episode that will make things a little bit better for you down the road.
Welcome to episode 47 of the Better Writer Podcast. Like I said in the intro, we are talking about how to make your life easier in revision by doing things a little bit differently when you are fast drafting. And before I get into my actual recommendations, I do want to say that these are suggestions. They are things that you can do while fast drafting, but they are not things that you have to do.
And if they are going to slow you down or trip you up or if you're going to start obsessing over them, don't do it. I do not want this to be the thing that keeps you from hitting your goal or getting your draft done. These are just suggestions. If you can do them quickly, great. If not, do not worry about it. These suggestions may not all be for you. And you don't need to do all of them. Some of them may actually even contradict each other. So choose the ones that work or one that works or choose none of them, whatever works for you.
Alright. First suggestion. And I think this is one that applies, even if you are just writing a regular draft, you're not trying to do it fast, you're not trying to do it for a challenge. side note here also, if you're just drafting in general, some of these suggestions will work. You don't have to be doing a challenge specifically. If you're just doing a fast draft, period, use these suggestions, see if they work for you. The first one is to take notes on your revision ideas as you go. So if you realize that you want to change something that has already been written.
First off, don't go back and change it, especially if you're in the middle of a challenge, but just make note of that idea. Do not assume that you are going to remember the brilliant idea you had at 2 a.m. when you woke up and realized that you had the solution to your character's motivation issue. Write it down somewhere, in some form. If you were in the middle of a writing session, jot that note to yourself super quickly and then put it aside and keep moving forward.
But do keep track of those revision ideas as they come to you. Some of them will end up not being relevant by the time you actually get to revision, but some of them might be gems that you want to hold on to. All right, so there's a number two, when you are taking notes on those revision ideas, make sure you're keeping them in the same place. That doesn't mean that you need to write them all in the same place. Maybe you are on the go, you have random post-notes scattered across your desk right now, but you also have notes on your phone where you're documenting those things during the day, I do recommend setting aside, setting aside at least one day per week to put them all together. Or maybe it's every two weeks you put them all together. You go through all the post-its and the notes on your phone and the voice memos if you're into that kind of thing and the things you dictated to yourself in the car if you're like me and you like using dictation for things like this.
Whatever it is, find a moment to gather those things together. Ideally separate from your writing time so you're not, you know, procrastino organizing along the way, but I do recommend having one location that you are going to remember to go look at when it comes time to revise, so you're ready to go and actually use those notes. All right, and then number three is I also recommend keeping a running list of the big decisions that you have made about character backstory and your world building.
Now, that does not mean writing down every single detail of your world and your characters as you write. That would be super tedious. But if there is something pivotal that you decide mid-draft, make note of it, especially if it's something that you did not have planned from the start.
For example, if you have an epiphany about your main character's core emotional wound, and all of a sudden it pops into your head that the reason why your main character cannot be in a loving, committed relationship is because their dog ran away when they were in third grade and they just could never get over this idea that people that you love unconditionally are going to leave you, then that is great. That's a great backstory. Write that down. Write that down somewhere just so you have a record of that epiphany, just in case you forget. And then in chapter 20, you have another epiphany that actually the source of their wound is that their dog was stolen, and that's a slightly different variation, or maybe something completely out of left field, like their parent had a midlife crisis and decided to become an astronaut and never came home. You know, if you decide something different later, keep track of those decisions so that you have a record of the pivotal world building character decisions you've made that you can reference later. So you have a head start on anything like a series Bible. This is going to help you keep track of those details.
All right, number four. this one is one that comes with a big fat asterisk. Going back to my point at the beginning, you don't want this to slow you down too much. So if this suggestion is going to derail you, ignore it. but suggestion number four is to reverse outline as you draft. And this one is for anyone who is a pantser through and through who does not outline in the beginning, does not have any record of where the story is going, keep a record of where the story went. just write a quick summary, what happened in that chapter. The benefit there is that when you go back to do structural revisions, you're not going to have to go back and read your whole draft or skim your whole draft to create a reverse outline. It will be there ready and waiting for you. you do want to be careful.
We don't want to spend an extra 30 minutes summarizing what we just wrote. We don't want to realize that we need to go change the whole beginning based on what we just summarized. We don't want to do that. We just want to have those notes for ourselves, maybe keep them separate for each chapter. Just a quick summary of what you wrote that day before you move on to the next day's writing. So do that at the end of your writing session. Just recap what you wrote, create like a one to three to four to maybe five sentence summary depending on how long the scene is, and then move on. Forget about it.
Like I said, I I It might be helpful to keep all those in one document, but I think there might be a temptation to start making revisions if you have them all in one place. So if you are not going to be able to keep your paws off of those previous chapter summaries, just like hit enter a few times and have that summary be at the end of your document, then you can go collect them later. That will still be faster than skimming the whole draft and creating a reverse outline after the fact. So if you can do that, you know, in a way that is an easy and efficient reverse outline as you draft. And then you can hit the ground running when your draft is done because your reverse outline will be ready for you and you can go analyze it and just strategize your revisions without having to do that interim step of going back to summarize your entire book.
And the other nice thing is that if you are in the drafting process and you suddenly realize you don't remember what you wrote the previous day, or maybe you don't remember what you wrote a week ago, you have a summary. You don't have to go back and read the whole chapter. And the benefit of having that summary is that you're not going to be tempted to go back and edit when you realize that there's a typo in sentence one of chapter one. You're just gonna look at your chapter one summary and move on with your life and then, you know, go do what you need to do. So that could also be helpful as you draft, not just after. So just a thought.
All right, and then my final final tip is to use TK or FCK, which is not an abbreviation for the F word, which is what I thought when I first heard this. ridiculous. I don't I was an English teacher, guys. so I I had never heard this term before. It's a journalism thing. FCK stands for fact check. As in that is a note to yourself to go back and fact check something, it does not mean F I don't know what to put here. Again, that's what I thought when I first saw that. I thought it was hilarious and realized it was, it was not. but if you would prefer for it to be the F-word in your draft, you do you. okay, so TK means to come. It is the abbreviation for to come. Yes, that would be TC, but the reason it's TK is because those letters do not appear together in the English language.
If you are writing in a world where T and K do appear next to each other, then it's going to be a problem. You're going to need to find a different symbol. but the the idea is that if you put TK in caps next to each other, you can then control F and go search for those TKs all through your draft. and basically you're gonna put in that TK anytime you don't know something. So if it's TK name, TK food item that I haven't decided the world building for yet, if it's TK place name, whatever it is, just it's a marker that you can use and then easily find to go see where you need to make changes in your draft. and the and the benefit there is that if you are fast drafting and you haven't made all of your world building decisions or you realize you need a culturally relevant food that you have not created the culture for yet, instead of pausing and stopping your drafting process to go research or do that world building, all you need to do is just drop a little placeholder in your draft and then move on with your life.
And the TK is just there so that when you go back to revise, you know that that is a thing that needed to be addressed. Is that your only option? Like I said, FCK stands for a fact check. You could put in FCK if that works better for you. I can't not see that and not see the F-word because I worked with high school students for too long and my mind remains in the gutter. I could never write that on the board and say that it said fact check. Like, no. anyway, so. Do what works for you. I some people will put in a random name, like they name their character Bob, even though they know that it's actually going to be something like Bartholomew because they're writing fantasy and that just fits better. But they put Bob for now and then they can go control F, find all the Bobs, switch it out with something else. I tend to just use like all caps and I'll just say like sister name in all caps.
And then because I know that I'm gonna go back and do a full rewrite because I'm a pantser and rewriting is part of the process. Then I can just, you know, as I go back, once I know what sister name is, then I can go fill that in as I'm rewriting the rest of the story. So whatever works for you, if it is TK, FCK, writing all caps notes to yourself, putting in parentheses, brackets, whatever it is that works for you, there are so many options. Just do something to mark for yourself the things that you do not yet know so that you are aware of what those things are. The kind of next step would be to then also create a list. As you add those TKs or brackets or whatever it is, make a list of the decisions that you need to make. The sister needs a name, you need a food item, the place, the street needs a name, whatever it is, write those things down so that you can have a consolidated list of all the world building, character, et cetera, decisions that need to be made. You might not then go make them all in one day, but you at least know that these are the questions that I need to answer before I can go and fix all of the things in the draft. Some of those things might be a big deal, some of them might be smaller, but at least you know what needs to be decided as part of your revision process.
All right. So again, those were five suggestions for making your life easier in revision while you're still in the drafting process. So just to recap, number one is to take notes on revision ideas as they come up to you. Don't expect to remember everything, especially one of those little epiphany moments. Write it down. Number two, keep those notes in a central location or make a plan to transfer your notes to a central location on a regular basis if you are someone who makes those notes on the go.
Number three, make sure you document big decisions that you're making about your world or your characters or other aspects of the story, just so that you have a record of those things for consistency later on.
Number four, try reverse outlining as you go by simply summarizing your writing for the day. So write your scene, finish your chapter, whatever it is that you have created in that day of writing, summarize it very briefly as the finale to your writing session so you have that record both for yourself as you continue drafting, just in case you need to check on something that happened, and then you have your reverse outline ready to go when you are done with your draft. And then finally, use placeholders or markers in the text to designate the things that you have not yet decided on or built in your world.
This is especially helpful for anyone who is doing hardcore world building. If you write fantasy, historical fiction, anything like that, put those placeholders in. Do not stop your fast drafting. Do not get behind on your writing challenge to go do research or world build. Put in those placeholders, mark them for yourself so you know what you need to decide. And then if you want to take that one step further, make a list of those decisions that you need to make so that you have them ready to go when you start revising.
All right, I hope this episode was helpful. Even if you are not going to touch a writing challenge with a 10-foot pole in the month of November, anytime you're fast drafting or even drafting at a regular speed, you can start setting yourself up for success in revision just by doing a couple of things that are going to make future you happy. But remember, you are drafting. You are in writing mode. If it is tedious or too time consuming, or if it derails you or gets you distracted, don't do it.
Let Future You be the editor. You focus on getting the story down in whatever way is most efficient and most effective for you. If you can incorporate one of these five tips, amazing. It will make your life easier, but you don't need to do all of them and you don't need to do them all the time. And if they don't work for you, leave them at the door. All right. I hope that this episode was helpful. If you enjoyed it, please consider sharing it with a friend. I want this podcast to reach as many writers as possible. So it would mean the world to me if you shared it, texted it, shared it on your stories on Instagram, whatever works for you. I would appreciate it. All right. Thank you again for listening. Have a wonderful week. Keep writing. Keep getting better. One word at a time. See ya.
