Wow, it’s been awhile! For the most part, that’s because my writing time has been devoted to working on the Omphalos manuscript. That means I get a free pass out of blog posting, right? No? Oh. Well then, I guess I’d better come up with something.

I’m hoping I’ll be ready to send Omphalos to beta readers by early August, or mid-August at the very latest. That’s later than I had originally intended, but I’d rather send off a piece worth reading than a half-polished mess.

In the spirit of expanding this blog post into something more than “hey, I’m still working on my novel,” I thought I’d talk a little bit about what my revision process entails. In broad strokes, anyway.

I’ve lost count of how many books and blog posts have championed the “just write!” philosophy of drafting a novel, but to be honest, that doesn’t work for me. Not only do I outline the first draft, but I take time between drafts to peel back the layers of story.

Once the first draft of a manuscript is complete but before I actually revise the text, I spend a long time– several weeks, usually– fleshing out each character arc, dissecting the plot, prospecting for plot holes and errors, pulling and pushing the setting into shape, creating scene cards, re-reading writing craft books, creating revision checklists, and so on. The work is both intensive and intuitive, as this is the stage at which sudden creative insights and revelations catapult the story forward.

I get to know my story and characters; I examine them as their therapist, family, and friend. I can’t adequately write scenes if I’m not intimately and acutely aware of each character’s motivation, their pathologies, the oblique details they notice, the cultural and technological subtleties of the world in which they live, the broader mechanics of the plot, allegory, etc. This is where I distill every scene down to its core elements to understand what I’m trying to achieve, what the inner and outer turning points are, and so forth. Most important is how it all ties together, how each story element influences every other.

Then I finally steep myself in the prose. I re-write each scene as needed, injecting the new elements, refining the old, and discarding stale artifacts from the first draft. Many scenes in the second draft are fresh; the story often changes dramatically at this stage. As I write, I print out each scene so I can edit and ask myself questions before I sculpt the prose.

When I’ve done this for the entire novel, I’ll go back through and fix anything that occurred to me as I was working. Little notes here and there– for example, if I’m working on Chapter 12, but an unforeseen change affects everything that happened prior, I’ll make a note to go back and fix these issues on the next pass.

Once major revisions and prose-polishing are finished, I do one final pass of the draft before handing it off to betas. At that point, I try not to look at it so I can attack the manuscript with fresh eyes when the comments start rolling in. I might write a short story or develop an idea for another novel in the meantime.

When I’ve received all the beta feedback, I print out the entire manuscript so I can analyze it and edit by hand as I read their comments. Then I work on subsequent drafts until it’s polished and ready to query.

What about you? How do you approach revisions and edits?