Revising a novel in passes: a practical order of work

Revision is where a novel is made, and it is also where many novels quietly stop. The draft is finished, the writer opens it, sees two hundred problems at once, and does not know which one to touch first. So they fix commas on page one, then a scene on page forty, then a name that changed halfway through, and three months later the book is the same shape it was, only tidier.

The cure I have found is to revise in passes. Each pass looks for one kind of problem and ignores the rest. You work from the largest problems to the smallest, because there is no point polishing the sentences of a chapter you are about to cut. This piece sets out an order that works for me, with rough time ranges for a draft of about 90,000 words. Treat the times as one writer's opinion, not as a rule. Some people do all of this in three months; some take three years.

If you are still in the middle of the first draft, this can wait. Get to the end first. I wrote about finishing a draft when the middle sags for exactly that stage.

The order at a glance

1. Let it rest

Put the draft away. Do not open it. Read other people's books, write something short, go outside. The point is to forget enough of your own intentions that you can read what is actually on the page instead of what you meant to put there.

How long is enough? Long enough that you can no longer recite chapter twelve from memory. For me that is about a month. If you cannot bear to wait, at least wait until you can open the file without your stomach dropping.

2. Read straight through, notes only

Print it, or change the font and send it to an e-reader, so it looks like someone else's book. Then read it from beginning to end in as few sittings as you can manage. The rule for this pass: no fixing. You may only make notes in the margin, and they should be short. "Bored." "Who is this?" "Lovely." "Didn't we already have this scene?"

At the end, write one page on what the book is about, what works best, and what bothered you most. That page will steer everything after it.

3. The structural pass

This is the big one. Make a scene list: every scene in order, each on one line. Then add columns. Mine look like this:

The purpose column is the test. If you cannot say in a few words what a scene does for the book, it may be doing nothing. If two scenes have the same purpose, one of them probably goes. Look too at the shape across the whole list: where the long stretches without change are, and whether the ending is set up by what comes before it.

Some books have unusual structures, and that is fine, as long as the structure is a choice. Salvatore Scibona has compared the structure of his first novel, The End, to a theme and variations in music: it circles one day in 1953 and keeps returning to it with more knowledge. Our profile of the novelist describes that shape. A scene list for a book like that would look odd in a conventional outline and still make sense on its own terms. The question is never "is this normal?" but "is this doing what I want?"

Make the cuts and moves in a copy of the file. Keep the old draft. You will want to raid it later.

4. The character pass

Now read for people. Pick your three or four main characters and follow each one through the book alone, skipping scenes where they do not appear. For each, ask:

• What do they want at the start, and what do they want at the end?
• Do they change, and is the change shown in a scene rather than announced?
• Are they consistent where they should be (speech, habits, history) and surprising where they should be?
• Do they disappear for long stretches without the book noticing?

This is where you catch the brother who is gentle in chapter four and cruel in chapter nine for no reason anyone explained. Sometimes the fix is a single new scene. Sometimes it is deleting a line that made him act out of character so the plot could move.

5. The scene pass

With structure and character settled, go scene by scene. For each one:

• Where does it start? Many scenes start too early, with arrivals and greetings. Try starting later.
• Where does it end? Many scenes end too late, after the important thing has happened. Try ending sooner.
• What does the point-of-view character want in this scene, and what stands in the way?
• What has changed by the end of it?

Scene work is slow, and it is the pass most likely to make the book feel alive. It is also where endings get rewritten. If your last chapter changed during the structural pass, it will need a scene pass of its own. Beatrix Hallam's essay on open and closed endings is useful here, because it asks what a final scene owes the reader.

6. The line pass

Only now do you work on sentences. Read slowly, a chapter a session. Cut words that do not earn their place. Replace vague verbs with exact ones. Watch for tics: every writer has a few. (Mine are "just," "almost" and characters who nod.) Search the manuscript for your own and decide case by case.

7. Read it aloud

Read the whole book out loud, or as much of it as you can stand. Your ear will catch what your eye skipped: sentences that run out of breath, three sentences in a row that start the same way, dialogue no person would say. Mark the clunks and fix them after each chapter. Do not make large changes in this pass; if you find a structural problem now, write it down and decide later whether it is worth reopening the book.

8. Final proof

Last, a pass for typos, repeated words, wrong names, inconsistent dates, and the bracket notes from your first draft that you forgot to resolve. Search for every square bracket. Search for each character's name and check the spelling. If you can, have someone else read for this pass too, because by now you cannot see your own pages.

A worked example: one paragraph, three passes

Here is an invented paragraph from the kind of draft I described above, two siblings clearing out their mother's house. I will take it through a scene pass, a line pass and a read-aloud pass.

First draft

Nora walked into the kitchen and looked around. It was very quiet. She thought about her mother, who had always been in this kitchen, and she felt sad. She opened the drawer by the sink and found a stack of envelopes tied with string. She picked them up and looked at them. They were addressed to someone named Ellen, which was strange, because her mother's name was Ruth. She wondered what they were and decided she would show them to Daniel later.

After the scene pass

The question was where the paragraph starts and ends, and what changes. It starts too early (walking in, looking around) and ends too late (deciding to show Daniel, which is a non-event). The change is the discovery, so the scene should begin close to it and end on it.

The drawer by the sink still stuck. Nora had to lift it to open it, the way her mother had. Inside, under the twist ties and dead batteries, was a stack of envelopes tied with string. Every one was addressed to Ellen. Her mother's name was Ruth.

After the line pass

Now the sentences. "Still stuck" and "had to lift it" carry the grief that "she felt sad" only announced, so that stays. "Every one" is fine. But "Inside, under the twist ties and dead batteries" is a slightly crowded sentence, and the string could be more exact.

The drawer by the sink still stuck. Nora lifted it to open it, the way her mother had. Under the twist ties and dead batteries lay a stack of envelopes bound with kitchen string. Every one was addressed to Ellen. Her mother's name was Ruth.

After reading aloud

Out loud, "lifted it to open it" has a stutter of "it." And the last two sentences land well, but "Her mother's name was Ruth" could be stronger if it feels less like information and more like Nora's thought.

The drawer by the sink still stuck. Nora lifted it the way her mother used to, and it gave. Under the twist ties and dead batteries lay a stack of envelopes bound with kitchen string. Every one was addressed to Ellen. Her mother had been Ruth all her life.

The paragraph went from 82 words to 49. More to the point, it now does its job: the reader feels the mother's absence through the sticking drawer, and the last line opens a question instead of closing a scene.

A few notes on doing this for real

You will not keep the passes perfectly separate. When a line catches your eye during the structural pass, it is fine to fix it, as long as you do not stop to polish the whole page. The order matters more than the purity.

You may also go round more than once. After the scene pass, some writers find the structure has shifted again and run a second, quicker structural check. That is normal.

Keep a running file called something like "later" for every idea that does not belong to the pass you are in. It saves the idea without derailing the work, and you will be surprised how many of those ideas look less urgent a month on.

And keep every version. Save the draft under a new name at the start of each pass. Cutting is much easier when you know nothing is really gone. More pieces on revision and finishing live on the drafting shelf.