Every writer knows that the bulk of work comes after they’ve finished their first draft. All writing needs revising and that is true for those who plan their stories as well as for those who don’t. Even Stephen King typically revises his manuscript three times, while the rest of us do it somewhere between five and fifteen times, sometimes more.

The point is, regardless of how skilled you are and how well the story is flowing, three revisions are the bare minimum. The first revision focuses on the big picture stuff, the second one on the plot and the third one on the prose.

Doing this kind of structured revision helps you avoid the double work of changing the same parts over and over again because you’ve changed something in the plot. You won’t get worn down by the drudgery, either, and can whip your manuscript into a respectable shape.

A good revision acts essentially like a zoom on a camera: you start by checking the wide-angle (zoom-out) and end by examining the small details in the macro perspective (zoom-in).

1st Revision: Fix the big picture

First drafts exist, so the writer discovers what the story is about. In essence, you are telling the story to yourself first, before you tell it to everyone else. They’re not meant to be pretty or complete, but functional, because they give you something to work with.

They’re often in such a poor state that you’ll be tempted to plunge right in and start fixing all the flaws. Don’t. Revising your first draft without a plan will burn your energy and double the amount of work. How so? Imagine that you’d start renovating a house by painting the walls, then discover you need to fix the plumbing and redo the wiring, too. Well, revising grammar and prose before fixing the story itself is very similar.

“I’ve found the best way to revise your own work is to pretend that somebody else wrote it and then to rip the living s— out of it.”

Stephen King

The first step of every revision should be a cooling-off period for your manuscript. The time in between allows you to gain the critical distance needed to approach your work as if it were someone else’s. For short stories, a week or two might do. For novels, think three to four weeks as a minimum. Once the period is over, print out your manuscript, take a red pen, find a cosy corner and read it. The paper will make sure the manuscript has your full attention and focus.

Make your notes, but focus on the story. Write down any questions or ideas that pop up while reading. You should already have an idea what the story is about, e.g. lost love, betrayed friendship, search for the meaning of life, etc. If you don’t know what the story is about, then start there: try to sum up the story in one sentence and use that as your compass.

After you’re done reading your first draft and making notes, it’s time to answer the questions below:

• Does the story work?
• Is it clear what the story is about?
• At what points do things get muddled up or unclear?
• Is the timeline consistent?
• Are there any plot holes (e.g. parts where events just happen without a proper explanation/reason)? Are there any inconsistencies?
• Is the protagonist relatable?
• Is your protagonist driving the story or do the events just happen to them and they go along for the ride?
• Does the protagonist develop/mature/change as the story progresses?
• Are all the major characters believable or are some of them flat and do they behave more like stereotypes than real people?
• Are there any characters/scenes that don’t serve the purpose of the story?
• Is the middle of the story strong enough to hold the attention?
• Is the ending satisfactory?

Make a list of answers and cluster them into groups depending on how much work they require. Then, make a list of all the changes you’d like to make, starting with the biggest ones and moving towards the smaller changes. You’d be wise to fix character issues first, especially your protagonist’s, since they will influence the rest of the story.

If you come across characters or events that could be removed without influencing the story, take them out. When you’re done fixing the bigger story chunks, compare your story structure to any of the bigger story models (e.g Save the Cat, Hero’s Journey, Story Engineering) or these 7 basic story structures, and see if there are any flabby parts left (e.g. the middle) and that your storyline isn’t flat.

Don’t worry if your story isn’t following these structures exactly, but it should carry enough substance to hold the reader’s attention. If you write genre, check out The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne, which has wonderful models for genre writers.

2nd Revision: Kill your darlings

In the second revision, you will work on each scene and make sure each scene causes the next one and there are no parts that are surgically fitted in because things need to happen. How to make this happen? Using the ‘but’ and ‘therefore’ rules of the creators of ‘South Park’, you should be able to connect each previous scene to the next one using the words ‘but’ and ‘therefore’. E.g. Mary wanted to hike, but the storm started, therefore she asked a few friends to come over and they brought some unexpected guests. If you can only connect your scenes using ‘and’, it’s likely you need to go back and work on your plot.

Prepare a list of all changes at the scene-to-scene level. If you use Scrivener, you can do that directly below the synopsis, by adding notes or custom metadata fields. This is also the time when you kill your darlings. The reason why this is hard is that chances are those are your favourite parts of the story, parts close to your heart, but which don’t belong there. We all need darlings to make us feel like we know how to write, but in rough terms, they’re clutter, a gorgeous collection of porcelain dolls in your brutalist industrial interior.

At this stage, examine the pacing of your story and check if it slows down when things get tense or speeds up through less important parts. If you write suspense, thrillers or horror, the pacing will be very different from if you write fantasy, romance or literary fiction. Make sure to follow the conventions of your genre. If you’re unsure how your story compares, explore some tools that can help you with that.

I use Autocrit (affiliate link) to help me identify the slow and the fast bits. Autocrit comes in very handy in the last part of the revision as well, because it helps me identify the passive voice, cliches and repetitions.

If you’re revising a short story, you can still divide it into scenes and fix the tricky ones first, but you’ll likely be able to revise the entire story from start to finish without difficulties.

3rd Revision: Polish the prose

After you’ve finished the second round of revisions, it’s time to work on the storytelling. The third revision is a thorough examination of your prose. If you underwrite, this will mean fleshing out the descriptions and making the story sing on the page. If you overwrite, you’ll need to prune your words to keep the story moving.

The third edit is also called the line edit because you’ll examine each line with surgical precision. It helps to do this on paper, where you can underline things, use different colours and make notes, though many find working on a computer more comfortable. Mark any descriptions that don’t work, parts where the prose is clunky or too heavy, or where there’s too much telling.

You’ll want to improve your show vs. tell ratio, which means showing the character’s anger instead of telling the reader they’re upset. Polish the dialogue and let your characters speak for themselves through their actions rather than serving their emotions to the reader on a plate.

To be fair, you can’t avoid telling in fiction, or else books would be twice as long and probably slower than they are, but it’s wise not to let the telling dominate your story. Otherwise, you won’t be taking the reader on a journey, but rather showing them a slide show of the journey. Those are two very different experiences.

If you need help with showing, make use of the Emotion Thesaurus, which is the most wonderful resource available for writers. I use it in combination with Autocrit (affiliate link), to bring out the emotional parts and work on my prose line by line. The third revision is also the time when you correct the grammar and catch the typos. Tools like ProWriting Aid and Grammarly can help you with that.

Once you’ve finished the revision, go back to the beginning and polish it till it sparkles. You might spend more time working on those first few chapters/paragraphs than any other part of the story. They are, after all, the doors into the world you’ve created and you want to keep them open and inciting.

For more guidance on story beginnings, check out this blog post on ‘Where to start your story‘.