Episode Seven: The Do’s and Don’ts of Revising Your Novel in 2026

Revision can be overwhelming but it doesn’t have to be. As a developmental editor, revision is my superpower and I love helping people figure out what to do with their messy first (or second) drafts. In this episode, I’m sharing six do’s and don’ts for revising your novel successfully in 2026. If you can approach revisions strategically, the entire process becomes easier, more efficient, and more effective. Let’s dive in!

You can listen to the full epsiode here. Or, watch here.

Links Mentioned:

• Get my Revision Kickstart Guide for free here: https://olivia-helps-writers.kit.com/revision-kickstart-guide

• Read my blog post on reverse outlining here:https://www.oliviahelpswriters/com/blog/reverse-outlining-what-why-and-how

• Learn more about Matt Bell’s book Refuse to Be Done here: https://bookshop.org/a/93888/9781641293419 (head’s up, I’m a bookshop.org affiliate!)

Transcript

Please Note: This is an automatically generated transcript that has not been edited.

Olivia Bedford (00:00)

Revision is hard, it is not easy, but we can make it doable, we can make it better, we can make it easier.

And that is my goal for today.

Welcome to episode number seven of the Better Writer podcast. This is our first episode of 2026. And I'm so excited that you're here because today I'm talking about one of my favorite topics in the world, revision. Now, before you roll your eyes, exit of the

really do love revising. I'm a pantser at heart. I think this is why I'm a developmental editor.

because revision is where I come alive. It is my favorite thing in the world to help people with. And I know that I am kind of in the minority there.

everyone has their strengths and weaknesses when it comes to the writing process. For me, I cannot help you come up with ideas. Do not ever ask me to help you to come up with the idea for a novel because I can't do it. I come up with ideas all the time, but they are like a lightning bolt. I am struck by an idea. I do not know where it comes from. 99 % of the time, it's while I'm brushing my teeth at night. Couldn't tell you why, but...

Ideas just kind of come to me is great when it works, not so great when it doesn't, but I am not the person who can really sit you down and help you find an idea for your novel. In contrast, if you come to me with a draft that already exists and ask me to help you make it better, I become the lightning storm. I am the one shooting off lightning bolts of ideas all the time. And it's so funny how, you know, different people are just better at different parts of the process, are better at explaining different parts of the process.

For me, revision is my superpower and that's why I want to talk about it today with you. Because I know that for so many people, revision is overwhelming and confusing and hard.

So I'm gonna try to help make revision a little bit easier with this episode by giving you six do's and don'ts of revising your novel. And this is gonna apply whether you are just working on your first draft or whether you have been circling your novel, poking and prodding at it for months, if not years. So first off, I just wanna say revision is hard, it is not easy, but we can make it doable, we can make it better, we can make it easier.

And that is my goal for today. All right. So here are my do's and don'ts for revising your novel.

first, do revise in layers. What do I mean by that? I mean you should break your revision down into steps so that you are not trying to revise every single aspect of your novel at once.

Revision becomes overwhelming when we try to every single little detail in our book at the same time. You're trying to fix character arcs while you also fix your commas and you're trying to add on to the conflict while you also try to fix all of your dialogue and your setting descriptions and everything else. And it quickly spirals out of hand because we cannot hold the entire picture in our heads at once.

And if we try to do all of those things in the same revision, it's going to get overwhelming, it's going to feel impossible, and most likely you're going to end up, working inefficiently because you're gonna have to backtrack and address all those things separately anyway. So you might as well do that from the beginning and save yourself time in the long run, even if it seems like you're working more slowly because you're working on one thing at a time.

Specifically, when we think about

that looks like in practice, I recommend starting with high level stuff first. Worry about your structure, your plot, your character arcs. Worry about how your conflict is escalating over the course of the novel as a whole. I recommend doing that with a reverse outline so that you are only looking at your structural elements and not worrying about how you've actually executed it on the page.

If you want to learn more about what a reverse outline is and how it works, will link a blog post that I wrote about it in the show notes. But the basic idea is that you are summarizing your story and then working from that summary to do your first round of revisions by literally just focusing on the story itself, revising your ideas for the story itself before you even think about implementing it into your story.

Then once you've done that, once you have looked at all the structural stuff and made sure that your story is working on that high level, go back and work on your execution at the scene level. For now, we're only worried about big things, but we're focusing on how they actually come across on the page. So for this round of revisions, you want to focus on how your characters are coming across in individual scenes. You want to make sure

each individual scene has conflict, that each individual scene is shown and not just told or summarized.

And you want to make sure that your dialogue is working at this point as well. But again, we are thinking about this in big terms. You want to make sure that your dialogue has conflict, that your dialogue is purposeful. We're not going to worry about fine tuning every character's voice quite yet.

Once each of your scenes is doing what it needs to do, it has a purpose, it has conflict, it has character development, then we are going to go back. We are going to dive in and really focus on that line level writing. This is where you want to fine tune your setting descriptions. You want to make sure that everything you're narrating is vivid and precise and clear for your readers. This is where you want to start editing dialogue to make sure that your character's voice is coming through on the page.

and that all of your characters sound different. You also want to make sure that your dialogue is engaging at this point. Are your conversations including a lot of filler words or small talk or are you getting to the point and making sure that those conversations have tension? These are all things that we want to do at this line editing stage to really refine and strengthen each individual scene. Then at the very end of this process, we'll start thinking about spell check,

about finding typos, all those grammar issues, and little things like that. I see way too many writers trying to start there. They want their story to be clean, so they run spell check and they think that they've revised. That's not revision, my friends. I'm so sorry if you thought it was, but revision is unfortunately far more complicated than that. And unfortunately, when you start by looking for grammar errors, if you start by looking for typos, you may end up wasting a lot of time because the section that you edited

could end up being taken out of the book completely or completely rewritten or completely changed in some other way. So start with the high level stuff first. Make sure everything on the page actually belongs there in that form. Then start fine tuning, then start cleaning it up.

Now, the exact tasks that I just listed are just scratching the surface and the exact order is going to vary author to author. You may have things that you don't need to revise because you already did them on the first draft. You may need to revise things that I didn't mention here. It's going to vary person to person.

Number two, do not read your first draft like it is a finished book. This one is so dangerous and it trips up newer writers all the time. for some reason, people think that the first step after finishing a first draft is to print the whole thing out or export it to a Kindle and sit there and read it as if it is a clear and compelling story. And,

You might be a person who writes super clean drafts. Maybe you can do that. But most likely,

If you're just starting out, if you have never written a book before, your first draft probably isn't in a state where it is going to be readable or enjoyable as if it's a book. And that's okay. Your first draft isn't meant to be perfect. It's not meant to be good. And I think if you sit down and try to just read your draft, two things can happen. The first is it can be incredibly demoralizing. You look at your story, you're expecting it to be great because it felt great when you were writing it, and then it's not.

and too many people I think give up because their first draft doesn't live up to their expectations and they think that they failed, that they're not going to be able to make it better and that simply isn't true. then the second thing that can happen is even if you don't give up on your story after reading your draft, you might be tempted to start changing surface level things because that's what pops out at you

when you're just reading the story from cover to cover. What I mean by that is you might fixate on grammar issues or awkward sentences or descriptions that fell flat, but until you have actually established that your story works on a plot level, those edits are pointless because you might be editing scenes that don't belong in your story or don't belong in the story in that order or need to be completely rewritten. So I am a big fan of reverse outlining because it a.

does not require you to read your book through like it's ready to be read. And because it enables you to really hone in on those story level issues first and to revise just the structure of your story before you try to do anything else. right. Then number three, do retype your draft instead of just copy pasting from the old draft.

This one is probably going to be controversial and you might have a cringe just hearing me say that, but trust me when I tell you that there is a world of difference between actually rewriting your story from scratch and simply copy, pasting, or tweaking the version that already exists. You don't need to do this for every single draft of your book, but I really advise you when you go from draft one to draft two

rewrite the thing. I did not come up with this by myself. I got this idea from Matt Bell and his book Refused to Be Done, which I will also link to in the show notes. But the core idea is that you actually have to make changes as you go from one draft to the next. And oftentimes, especially if you write messier or you're newer, your first draft is going to contain a lot of great ideas.

but is going to be hampered by very poor execution. Again, it doesn't mean you failed, it's just the reality of the process. So if you simply start tweaking what you already have, if you're just making minor changes, or you're just copying things over and then starting to move them around on the page, it is highly, highly likely that those problems of execution will persist into the next draft.

because you might think you're making big changes, but really the core of what you have is still there and it's still not working. When you're retyping your story, you put yourself in a position to critically evaluate every single sentence in your story and you have to decide for every single sentence, is it worth retyping? Is it worth putting on the page again? Or is there a better way to say this? Is there a better version of my story?

That doesn't mean that you need to completely rewrite it from memory either. What I like to do is have a printed copy of my book next to me and then I type into a document on my computer screen. You could also use a split screen or a dual monitor, whatever works for you. But again, I'm referencing what I've already written, but then I'm deciding, is there a better way to say this? Or if I decide it really is already working well, then I will retype that exact phrasing. But again,

only if it's worth it.

Another benefit of this process is that it works really well with a reverse outline. So basically, the reverse outline becomes my checklist of scenes to add, scenes to delete, scenes to rewrite. And then I have my reference copy as I'm retyping, either revising old scenes or adding new ones as I go. It also allows you to start handling those line level issues at the same time that you're still working on

developmental changes by implementing new scenes, et cetera. So it is a great way to kind of kill two birds with one stone while making sure that you are actually making changes that matter to your story.

Number four, do not fixate on your original ideas. You have to be willing to let go of what you wrote before. Otherwise, your revisions will not work. And I want to be really clear. That does not mean getting rid of everything that you wrote the first time. I am not an advocate of kill your darlings as a blanket rule. I think that advice is often given with

out enough context and it ends up getting misused. Loving something is not a reason to cut it from your book. I sometimes hear people who say, I loved the scene too much so I think I have to get rid of it. I'm like, why? If you love it, readers probably will too. So Kill Your Darlings gets overused where people think that liking something is a bad thing in their books and it's not.

Kill your darlings really means if there's something that you added because you like it, because it's fun, but it isn't serving your story or isn't serving the experience you want readers to have, then we get rid of it. But only then.

What this really means is you just need to be honest with yourself about the impact of your choices. Maybe you decided to do something experimental and it didn't work. Maybe you have a character that you really, really like, but they actually are completely redundant with another character. You don't automatically have to get rid of them, but you might need to change what they do in the story or how they're used. killing your darlings

mean

removing them from the story. It could mean changing them, reworking them, adjusting them. The idea here is that you're not getting stuck on your first idea and assuming that your first idea is your best idea. Unless it is. Sometimes what you came up with in the original draft is great, is working. So we want to be careful here that we're not trying to change everything just to say we've revised. We want to be

critical, we want to be very strategic. We want to analyze what is and isn't working before we start making these choices. But when we realize something isn't working, we need to be willing to let go of that original idea and do something different. Another thing to be careful of here is critically assessing whether what you prioritized was the right thing.

I see this often when writers are trying to surprise readers. They think that surprising them is the best way to keep readers engaged and hooked in stories. And I think this happens because surprises are often memorable. We remember twists in books that we read. We tell our friends, you have to read this book. It has a great twist. And then we want to replicate that. And twists are great. Surprises are great.

However, surprises are only one tool in our literary arsenal and they often aren't the best tool for actually engaging readers long term. Because you think about it, you can't be excited about something if you don't know it's coming. You can't be afraid of something if you don't know it's coming.

And those two emotions, anticipation or concern for the characters is what keeps readers engaged in the story. So, surprises can absolutely work. They can enhance a reader's experience. But if you're over relying on surprise, you can end up with a book that has no suspense, no tension, no conflict, because readers have no idea what they should be worried about. They have no idea what's going wrong in the world because you were trying to surprise them. And instead, you just made your book boring because all of the

problems are hidden from the reader. your intention was good. You wanted to have a twist. You wanted to surprise readers and have them talking about your book to all of their friends. But if you misapply that goal, if you make that goal a priority when it should be secondary that is where we can run into trouble. And that is where you might need to let go of that big twist and instead plant that conflict earlier. Let readers see what's happening earlier so they can actually

Get excited, be worried about the characters, and be hooked in your story from the start.

the big thing to remember here is that the first draft can be just for you. When you're writing, when you're creating, when you're drafting, it is all about what you want, what you find exciting, what you find interesting and unique and fun to explore. Once you decide that you are going to publish your book, you are no longer the most important person in your writing. It's now the reader.

And if you hate that, if you don't want to write for other people, that is totally fine. But then publishing should not be a goal. If you want to publish your book, if you want to make money from your writing, you have to put the reader first. And that's what this tip is all about. If your original idea does not serve the reader, it has to go. Or you need to decide that you're writing something else for a different group of readers. That's fine, too. But either way, we need to make sure that our audience and our writing align. Otherwise, it's not going to work out very well for us.

And that brings me to number five, do put genre first. I see so much writing advice out there that is supposed to be genre agnostic. And there are definitely tips and rules that apply to all genres equally. However, almost all of that advice still needs to be adapted to a specific genre lens.

For you as a writer, when it comes time to revise, you need to think very critically about the experience you are giving readers and what they want from a book in your genre. a romance reader does not want a generic story that happens to have a couple on the cover. They want the book to be a romance from start to finish, and that means following different rules than if you were writing a mystery or a thriller or even women's fiction.

The goal here is not to make your story identical to the other stories in your genre. It's just to make sure that you are actually hitting the expectations, the conventions, the things that readers are going to want to see when they pick up that specific book.

I also recommend starting your revision process by getting super, super clear on which genre you're actually writing. You may think that you know or that it's an obvious answer, but you would be shocked by the number of times I have clients come to me who say they're writing one genre and then I get into the manuscript and I have to let them know that they're actually writing something else. Usually it's a matter of a specific sub-genre, but sometimes I have people writing romance with a tragic ending and

It's no longer romance, at least not a romance with a capital R. And that's not necessarily a problem. there is no one genre that you should be writing. It's just a matter of making sure that what you are labeling your story as is what it actually is. Because ultimately, genre is a marketing category. Genre is a method of communication that allows you to find the right readers for your book. So it's not

that that person should have written romance with a happy ending, they just actually needed to call their book something else so that they can set the right expectations for their readers. But that is something that we need to be clear on as we revise so that we can make sure we are making the right choices for our genre for the story we are trying to tell.

And finally, number six, do not get feedback before you're truly ready. And specifically don't get the wrong type of feedback before you're And that can happen in a couple of different ways. First off, I highly, highly, highly recommend keeping your first draft to yourself. Make revisions on your own first before showing it to anyone else.

and this is especially true of anyone who is not an experienced writer or editor. Your first draft should never go to your best friend who loves book talk. Why? Because your best friend has probably never seen someone's raw first draft and they're either going to give you feedback that is unhelpful or they're going to give you feedback that is downright harmful. That could look like them telling you that your book sucks because it's unreadable because it's a first draft

Or it could even be in the form of them giving you valuable feedback on something you shouldn't be worried about at that point in the writing process. For example, if they go in and clean up your grammar, it might be very helpful, it might be very generous, but that's not the kind of feedback you need on a first draft. So I generally recommend that everyone do at least one round of editing on their own. But if you really need feedback, if you are hopelessly stuck, go to someone who understands the writing process.

Go to a writer who has experience with their own first drafts. Go to a critique partner. Go to a writing class. Go to a developmental editor who is going to specifically look at the story as a whole and will not give you feedback on your grammar when they know it's a first draft. So again, it's not that you should never get feedback. Feedback is essential.

but you do need to be very careful about who sees your first draft and whether or not they are actually going to be equipped to give you helpful feedback or if they are going to focus on the wrong things and knock your revisions off course. Also be very careful that you're only showing your early drafts to supportive people. We all know the people in our lives who give us scathing critiques in the name of being helpful and that's

might be helpful at some point in your process, but it's unlikely to be helpful with a first draft when you're still building confidence in your story. Honestly, I am never a fan of scathing critiques. I think they usually do more harm than good. That is why I am a strengths first editor. That is why I always lead with what is working. I try to be positive and empowering because writing is vulnerable. Writing is hard. And if you know that someone is going to tear you down,

Do not share your draft with them. Just don't, even if they want you to. Just say it's not ready and keep saying it's not ready until they forget about it and leave you alone.

are also ways that you can get feedback on an early draft. I generally don't recommend developmental editing for first drafts, but a manuscript evaluation, a book coach, something like that.

can be helpful because again, those are gonna focus on very high level things. They are not going to get into your execution on the page. They're not going to get into grammar or anything like that. And if anyone tries to give you feedback on your grammar when they are reading your first draft, just run, run the other way. That does not matter at this point in the story. The only thing that you need to worry about when you are revising your first draft, that first round of revisions is whether or not the story is working as a whole.

everything else can wait because if your story is not working at a structural level you are going to be rewriting. You are going to be making massive changes and that is going to mean redoing all of those line level edits anyway so don't double your work. Just handle the story level stuff first then come back to line edit and copy edit and everything else at the end when the story is set in stone.

All right, those are my six do's and don'ts for revising your novel in 2026.

Thank you so, much for listening to the Better Writer podcast. Happy New Year. I hope you have a wonderful start to 2026 and I'm so glad that you're here making me part of your writing journey.

One of my big goals for 2026 is to share this show with as many writers as possible. So if you know someone who needs to hear this right now, please send it to them. Take a screenshot, share it on social media.

Anything you can do to support would mean the world to me.

Thank you again for listening to another episode of the Better Writer Podcast. Happy writing. Keep getting better one word at a time. See